I received my undergrad this past summer, at the ripe age of 25, in photography and journalism. Turns out, that part of my life hasn't panned out yet.

While I was going to school, though, I was working. What started as a almost-full-time mindless call-center job quickly took off, as I was 'promoted laterally' through different positions, finally ending up working on the business projects team of a pretty large online retailer. Then stuff got interesting.

The fraud guy

I was working, primarily, on reducing our fraud. I was the fraud guy. As I got more in depth into it, I had to figure out how to get to our data in MySQL - so I started teaching myself. I had problems, I solved them, I asked for help, I googled it.

From there, I've been adopted into our Business Intelligence and data team (not what we call ourselves, but you get the idea), as a report specialist. That quickly turned into being a database developer and

This is my first blog post.

I'm going to try to keep this going for a while. I want to talk about things such as how I got where I am, how I learned to program things and script things, and the experiences I've had working with a unique, extremely diversified and tiny team.

I should talk about that real quick. There is 6 people on my team. 2 have linguistics backgrounds, 2 have CS backgrounds, one used to work for an insurance agency doing statistical modeling, and 3 of us started in the call center and filtered our way up, like I did. Everyone has totally different skills, but we all work together amazingly. I'll get into that in a later post.

Some specific topics I want to talk about: - Where I learned to program, or didn't. - Sublime Text and its influence on making me better. - Learning Perl from nothing in a weekend. - Attempting PHP as a backend scripting language - Working with terrible Windows applications - Working with (to me, anyways) terribly huge data.