The summer between second and third grade, my mom brought home an IBM PC Jr. No hard drive, 126k ram, and a 5.25″ floppy disk with the word “DOS” on it. It was a loaner from her elementary school. The principal said, “Take this home and see if it can be of any use in the classroom.”

After the first week, of it being in our house, I don’t think anyone but me touched the thing. No one else knew what to do with it. I, however, begged to go to the library. I checked out every book in the kids section that had anything to do with computers. (All five of them.) After those, I was pouring over the card index for books in the grown-ups section. It was then I discovered BASIC.

I read through a couple of the books, following along with each example. I can remember trying to figure out “LET J = J+1″, and what is this “GOSUB” thing they keep mentioning.

Eventually, it all started to make sense. Two summers later, even though I had no clue that such a thing even existed, I had programmed my first screen saver. Of course, you had to call it up manually, and hitting the keyboard did nothing (there was no computer mouse back then).

I eventually moved on to Windows 3.1 and QBasic. It wasn’t until college that I realized my penchant for programming was always in generating graphics. After a semester or two, I found the 3D Lab and the rest was my career. I have always loved programming on the back-end, though and used HTML/CSS as a break from animation.

Now I get the best of both worlds creating animations by day and web code by night. Check out the Web Portfolio above to see some of the websites I’ve created. It’s a rare pleasure in this world to be paid for doing what you love, and I love every second of it.