Adrien J. Howard aka adorablepuppy

 * '''IRC:''' adorablepuppy on irc.freenode.net

= Introduction =

Quite some time ago when tinkering with computers, I installed my first GNU/Linux distribution, Debian. Eventually I broke the system and the Debian disc got scratched on the top, so I downloaded Slackware and installed it. Since the Slackware system didn't start X, I was stuck in shell until I got it fixed. From my command line work on Windows 98, I knew how to change directories and luckily for me, the dir command existed. I searched the system for the place where the cd and dir commands were stored. I found /bin and jedit and went on my way to edit the system's config files until X worked. After Slackware dropped support of GNOME in favor of KDE(Slackware 10.1 I believe), I decided to try other distributions. 

The entire order went something like:
 * Debian
 * Slackware
 * Red Hat
 * Slackware
 * SUSE
 * Slackware
 * FreeBSD
 * Slackware
 * Puppy
 * DSL
 * MonoLive Disc (based on Ubuntu I believe)
 * Foresight
 * Gentoo
 * Foresight
 * Ubuntu

Through Slackware, I learned the internals of Linux, how to compile source, how to configure things. It was my favorite until Foresight, where I learned that manually managing your dependencies as I'd done in the past was a waste of time.
----
= Software Development Career =
I'm a software developer and have wanted to be since the age of 12. I took classes at a local community college on VB, but before the beginning programming in VB course, I'd already surpassed the advanced programming class. I was driven to create an skinnable interface editor similar to notepad, but with a "cool skin". I almost got the editor finished when I decided the project was stupid in the first place. After I'd taken all the programming and networking courses in college, I was left with general education classes. After a while of unemployment that stemmed from a dispute in a local grocery store, I got a job in software development, where my skills in programming elevated me to the position of Chief Software Architect. But, it wasn't hard. I was the only programmer and got to choose my title. To this very day, I remain there.
----
= Programming Languages Known =
 * Python (my favorite)
 * Various .NET languages
  * C#
  * VB.NET
  * J#
  * Boo
  * IronPython
 * VB6
 * Java
 * Javascript
 * Ruby
 * PHP
 * Lisp and Scheme
 * Various SQL implementations
  * Microsoft SQL
  * MySQL
  * PostgreSQL (favorite platform!)
= Markup and Markup Related =
 * HTML
 * CSS
 * XML
 * XSL(T)