I’ve been told in the past that every blog needs to have an “about the blogger” section, and I don’t want to be the exception to the rule. So here goes:

General info about me:

Nick: Sparky (Hopefully you knew that.)
Education Status: Student, currently studying primarily Chemistry, among other things.
Marital Status: Single.
Languages Spoken: German, English, Spanish.
Hobbies: Programming, composing.

Tech fact sheet:

‘Main’ Languages: HTML/JScript/CSS, PHP, Perl, Python, SQL, XML
Everything else known: C++, Assembler, ASP, Ruby
Learning: Java, ColdFusion, LUA

My tech life:

I first started programming when I was in middle school, on a TI-83 calculator (BASIC). I was originally interested in writing text (and later assembler) games for the platform, although it was not my first interest in development. I first started HTML when I was 11 years old, originally to design profile pages on several websites.

When I was 11, I decided to go one step further - I learned JavaScript, and real HTML - and started writing my own scripts and designing ugly but complex pages on a Tripod free site. I wrote some new code almost every day, always trying to get better.

By 12, I’d picked up PHP somewhere along the way. I had a free hosting account from a Plesk host, and was working on a simplistic integrated forum and blog system in it. I didn’t know any SQL at that point, which held me back significantly, but that was a roadblock I was over before the year had ended. Later in that year, I switched to a paid cPanel hosting company.

At 13, I’d had enough of shared hosts imposing their restrictions upon me - I knew PHP, Python, JavaScript and some ASP, and wanted to code in whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And so, 1 gig reseller account in hand, I launched a free hosting service on the now-defunct sparky2002b.net, offering free plans to anyone else with ambitions as large as mine. It soared in popularity, and before long, I had more accounts than I did resources, and I didn’t know where to go. In the end, I found a deal with a server company, fixing server issues for their clients over SSH in exchange for a dedicated server of my own.

About a month after my 14th birthday, I canned sparky2002b.net and launched CloudNine Web Hosting, a paid hosting business with a starting margin of zero customers. I announced several ill-fated scripts, including CloudBoard, that month. I also started using Linux extensively, doing some kernal optimization as well as contributing to various KDE projects.

Ever since then, CloudNine has been growing and I’ve been picking up more programming languages along the way. I work freelance, finding jobs at Rent-A-Coder as well as through real life offers (and hopefully, through this blog). CloudBoard, having been completely scrapped and restarted twice now, is slated for a 2008 release, with a beta already available.

Life goes on.