Patrick Stewart changed my life. Yes, I know how that sounds.

I’ve always been fascinated by technology and telecommunications in particular. The ability to share ideas and data in seconds from anywhere on the planet is unheard of in any prior generation. As far back as I can remember I’ve had a knack for all things electronic. For one reason or another, I can’t do calculus to save my life, but when it comes to computers, and other electronics I just get it instinctively. I spent a better part of my childhood and early teens teaching myself to fix things in between episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation even though “inversing tachyon fields” is rarely a legitimate solution in the real world. However thanks to my time spent tinkering and learning by some unprecedented self motivation, I find myself in a datacenter job at age sixteen, working with people who are shocked to find later that a sixteen year old kid saved their businesses thousands of dollars worth of downtime. Now as I’ve moved on to a different company, and am a few years wiser, I find more and more it is the people who have a real passion for what it is they do that makes them good at it. I can say with certainty that all the people who really are good at what they do are the kids who were like me; they were fascinated and couldn’t help themselves but to absorb any and all information like a sponge.