I grew up around computers in an era where that wasn't the norm, and I was enchanted with them. I loved being able to think about computers and to test my intuitions, and as I learned to program, to use them to explore my own ideas.
I loved, I needed, as a teenager living a fairly isolated life, to have the kind of access the early Internet gave to communities around the world. The experience of the Internet was not always a good one, not always a healthy one, not always a wise one, but it was still a way to connect in a bigger way, and occasionally in a deeper way.
Much of my life has been led by my relationship with technology: the places I've lived, the people I've known, and so on. This was not just about work, but about a big part of what made me me. I've been a developer of the FreeBSD operating system since I was a teenager, and developed numerous other pieces of open source software along the way, sometimes because I needed something to exist that didn't, and sometimes just to prove to myself that I could.
So I took interesting and challenging jobs, too, and have worked particularly in the intense loci of algorithms and data models that are storage, networking, and applied cryptography.
I continue to do that work, even if the Internet has become less and less a place I want to live my life. I've found that I like figuring out and sharing with people more than computers, given the choice, too. I would rather be with another person, or, failing that, be out in nature, than in front of a computer.
Technology remains for me an intense realm in which to experiment with systems and ideas, and to accomplish impossible things. And it has been for me a means to accomplish so many unlikely things: from doing work that other people thought was important, to being able to transform the futuristic machines of my childhood, to doing scientific research in ecoinformatics. I carry all of that with me, and the hope it represents.
I have a much-neglected FreeBSD developer page, also.