I was born in April 1987, a stone’s throw from the Etobicoke-Mississauga border near Toronto, Ontario.

As a child, I always had a fascination with computers. By the age of 4 I was beating my grandmother in games of Classic Concentration on her 286 computer and dabbling in writing BASIC programs from books I got at the public library. I was different than the other kids; I preferred staying inside keeping to myself.

Later on I picked up my old man’s all-in-one electronic lab kit, and began making AM crystal radios and morse-code machines. This was the beginning of my fascination with resistors, capacitors, and what you could make all the little parts do when you hook them up in different ways. All this at the age of 6.

Around that time, I became interested in music. My mom had bought a cassette player and a tape of whatever pop music was around back then (Ace of Base?). My old man walked by as I sat in the corner listening to it, and shook his head. He lead me into his workshop, closed the door, and turned up Q107 (a classic rock station) on the stereo. The song I heard was “Custard Pie” by Led Zeppelin. This is what started my infatuation with rock ‘n’ roll. I couldn’t get enough. I saved up all my allowance money and slowly bought Led Zeppelin’s entire catalog.

A couple years later, my uncle brought over a present for me. It was a Fender Jazz ’60-ish bass guitar. It took me a while to grow into the enormous instrument, but I was soon cutting my teeth, and dreamed of being John Paul Jones one day.

When I was 8, my grandpa took me and my cousin to a cottage on the banks of the Sturgeon River in Northern Ontario. I caught my first fish off the cottage dock, and I still remember that moment. It was a 1lb smallmouth bass, and I screamed so loud that everyone in residence at the lodge witnessed that life-changing moment. To this day, we go back to the same lodge every summer for more memories of fishing, campfires and the stuff that ties friends and family together.

I was never a superb student through grade school, never excelled at anything in particular. However, I was good at everything. I enjoyed English as much as Calculus, but didn’t fare as well in Physics. Somehow, with a mediocre average bolstered by a 99% in Grade 12 Music (I still feel I have the right to brag about that one), I made it into the ECE program at the University of Toronto, even though I was probably better off going into a more verbal course of study.

I withdrew from that before I considered CS, and through a miserable struggle of full-time school combined with a part-time labour job, clinched a spot in the Software Engineering specialist program where I am currently studying, sans part-time job. The worst has passed.

I am deeply interested in hardware and systems programming, and I am trying by best to slant my education towards the Engineering side. I also enjoy the aspects of Software Engineering that have to do with what I call “human factors”: figuring out what the client wants and how to deliver it.

So, me in 4 words?

Fishing. Music. CS. Cereal.