About time for some contribution

Ok, its about time for some contribution here.  Hi, I'm Brian Krygsman (@brnkrygs).

I'm a software developer.

I think the bug hit me in the early years of high school.  I had spend my younger years playing with the Tandy my Dad brought home one day.  I was absolutely fascinated with it and found all sorts of excuses to interact with it.  There were simple games, and playing 'spy' by typing out word processing documents. It seemed magical to me that you could illicit behavior in a virtual world (or, more accurately at the time an imaginary world) just through tapping on keys.

Fast-forward a bit to high school where I helped found the computer club at the school and began getting more into software.  Karel the robot was where it was at.  I loved tackling and solving problems and Karel presented entertaining problems to solve, while gently introducing programming concepts like branching structure, iteration, and recursion.  Before that I assumed I'd have to be a structural engineer to be "problem-solver" in the way I felt called to be.  But my exposure to software development easily convinced me there was a better avenue for my interests.

I think the aspect of software development that captured me was the endless creative possibility.  The idea that you're building an environment from scratch. You define the rules, you define the structure, you network with other environments if you so choose.  Those poor structural engineers are stuck solving problems in the physical world with all of its complications and limitations.  Fascinating and creative solutions come out of those restrictions of course, and thats not to say that software doesn't have its own level of restriction. But, part of the nature of software right now is how fast it breaks through limits that once were considered hard-and-fast.  Working in software gives me the freedom to solve problems in creative ways, to build fascinating systems and worlds, and to help those around me (and on the other side of the planet!) interact with their increasingly digital lives.

As a professional, I've spent most of my time developing on the web. In college I did a bit of work with Java thick clients, but since then its been on the web. Mostly LAMP stack work (Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python), with a heavy dose of front-end CSS/Javscript alongside, but more recently I've been working with Chadrick in the .NET world with C# and Microsoft SQL Server, with a bit of Ruby (Rails) on the side.

As Chadrick said, this blog is mostly an exploration of the Ping Ping Paired Programming development methodology.  Or, this blog has at least been initiated by it.  We're both passionate about improving ourselves as developers, learning as much as possible, and finding a way to implement it.  I'm excited to see where this leads.