2005 was an incredible year for me. Six months ago, I was “working for the man” and now, I am trying “to be the man.” I am slowly but surely making progress but there is more work to be done. Many of you do not know my story or much about me, so here it is in a series of occassional posts called My Story.
I was using a high-speed Internet connection before most people were using dial-up – the result of a Dad who is a network engineer. But it wasn’t until my early college days though, when I became fascinated with the Web. I started playing with HTML via FrontPage for fun and became relatively proficient with hand coding pages by the time I graduated Boston College (BC) with my Computer Science degree in 2002.
From college, I went straight to grad school at the University of Pennsylvania. While I got in through the School of Engineering, I was a bit sneaky. I really wanted to take classes with the MBA students over in the Wharton School – and I did. It just so happened that my program was flexible enough to allow me to take a significant portion of my classes outside the engineering school.
For the most part, grad school gave me more time on my hands than I thought it would. As a result, I had more leisure time available and was online a whole lot more. During my vast adventures on the Web, I came across some strange websites called “blogs”. Having an “online journal” intrigued me and I launched what I would now qualify as a blog in late 2002 (I was against the term for a long time due to the ridiculousness of many of the blogs I had seen).
At that point, I had no clue that there were “blogging platforms” out there or even that there were business and tech bloggers. Most of the bloggers I read were news or politically oriented. My “blogging” was all about personal observations – it was sporadic at best and consisted of me hand coding all of my pages – down to even making my own monthly archives.
