If you look at any progression of events in reverse, they can be seen as predetermined or necessary. That’s probably the case in terms of my past experiences and my current trajectory. Even so, I’ll try my best to muse about past experiences and my present reality that seems as if it’s guaranteed.
The earliest experiences I can remember that are tied at all to Computer Science are console modding. When I was 11 or 12 I first got a Nintendo Wii and I remember watching a lot of videos related to installing the Homebrew Channel on it which allowed you to activate cheats in games and install other things on the console. A similar thing happened when I got a Sony PSP a few years later. I think that at some point in that process I started to conceptualize myself as a technical person.
It was only in highschool when I got the real opportunity to do anything related to computers though. My higschool offered IT courses related to configuring CISCO switches and routers that I took throughout highschool. I didn’t really like the teacher much, he’d regularly use computer lockdown software to lock our screens and talk for a large part of the class making it hard to get work done. I also got the opportunity to take an application programming and game programming course while I was there and seemed to be good at both of them.
When I was 19 or 20, I was sexually/romantically questioning but got swooned by an internet friend who ran a Linux related server. Hearing about it (and probably wanting to impress him) made me want to get experience with it and learn how to use it, so I installed a version of Ubuntu on a laptop of mine. After breaking a few installs in ways that are still a mystery to me I gained my footing with it. I have switched to different distributions of Linux over the years, but it’s always been my primary operating system.
When I eventually went to college a few years later, I knew that it’d be Computer related. I went to Gateway Community and Technical College for IT because they didn’t have computer science and I excelled at it. After finishing my degree there, I realized I couldn’t get anything with a 2 year degree and after working for awhile I went back to school an NKU to work towards my B.S. Computer Science degree.