ShwaTech Launches the Goings On Tech Blog
More than 30 years after I built my first computer in my mom’s living room in San Diego, I’m launching my first online tech blog called Goings On, a blog about what’s happening at ShwaTech and around the software and technology industry in general. My intent for this blog is to serve the community with interesting news, share what ShwaTech is up to, publish release information for tools that ShwaTech shares on Github or via my own repos, and let people know who I am and what I’m up to.
When I was a kid I had my own website chrisster.com which is now owned by a Greek photographer. While I wish I still had that domain (imagine the SEO cred) I’m happy to see it put to good use. I also have a soft spot for photographers since my mom taught me how to shoot manual film cameras in the 90s and I began to capture the outside world with the same fervency as the virtual worlds I simultaneously inhabited.
When I was 8 years old my dad bought a 386 desktop PC for an insane amount of money, something like $3,000 which today would be about $7,500. I remember waking up in the morning and he was already playing Commander Keen. He had ordered some shareware in the mail which arrived on 3.5” floppy disks and thus my foray into PC computing kicked off with a nerdy kid stuck on Mars packing a laser gun.
When America Online allowed us to start chatting and sharing files I started working on game guides and wrote two definitive move guides for Mortal Kombat 3 and Killer Instinct although I never finished the latter. Seeing almost 30,000 downloads for something I created gave me an immense amount of confidence to keep making things. If you can decode the messages hiding in the Wingdings fonts please let me know. The character encoding seems to be lost on the modern version of Word.
While my dad was giving me programming lessons and teaching me BASIC I was writing mods for Duke Nukem 3D in C when I got my first job offer. Sadly they turned me down because I was only 13. And that year I met my new best friend David in middle school, a man with a genius mind who would spark my curiosity to explore computer networking and security at a time when both were in their infancy.
