[Deadron]

I stumbled on the podcast a little while ago and am making my way through all the back episodes. After the repeated plugs for the quality of the forums, I figured it was time to check them out.

I'm a 40+ gamer who started playing games on homemade computers (Adventure!), VIC 20s, TRS-80s and Commodores. I got my first taste of programming with BASIC on TRS-80s (no kidding, I was walking a mile through the snow to get to the school computer, and spent the nights at home feverishly reading programming books).

As a result of this early corruption, I'm now a Senior Engineering Manager in Silicon Valley.

While I've always been a game player, left to my own devices I get obsessed with creating the thing I'm interested in, and I spent much of a decade doing amateur game development as a hobby. After not much response, I created a quite popular game on the site I was a part of, but I found that obsessive game development was detrimental to my job. In short, it turned me into a lousy manager.

So now I'm back to just gaming (at least until I retire!), and I'm intentionally using gaming as a hobby that allows me to relax and get my mind off work but that doesn't take over my brain and make me a bad boss (well, except for that stint as an Everquest guild leader in the early EQ days...)

So now I've confessed (some of) my sins...on to the forums!