When I was ten, I borrowed the programming books and programs my father used for work so I could learn to make my own computer games. In a few weeks, I had a really awful Defender clone in Basic. I kept getting better, learning more, and a year later, as I watched over Dad's shoulder as he worked and kept pointing out bugs, he hired me to help with loan processing software. It seemed these machines were something like magic and a mad scientist's creation rolled into one. In my twenties, I sought others in my generation who had the same fever. The most amazing and most talented software engineers were always this kind of person. We built electronic postage in the 90's, and even got the thrill of having my name on the patent. With another team, built systems management software that we sold to Microsoft and is now Systems Center. After that, became the architect working on enterprise security software and started working managing teams, both local and offshore. It takes a warped mind to understand and properly take care of a software development team, and luckily all those years of dreaming in code put me in the right mindset.With these last few years, have been fortunate to work on massively scaled cloud applications, big data, mobile and machine learning applications. I have an extensive network of engineers who are still just entranced kids tinkering with the machine at heart, but have grown up to become mental giants in the craft; I can assemble a small team of these wizards and we make software, systems and apps that are amazing.It's getting harder to find more people who were sucked into software like this. Recent grads seem to enter the field as just a job, not for the love of the craft. I started taking on apprentices, with the ultimate aim of providing a few more of us to the world. If you've been looking for a few software heads like us for your project, ping me.