Ever since my father showed me how to program a simple Yahtzee program when I was seven, I have always had a fascination with programming. I used to see programmers as wizards, encyclopedias of computing capable of solving any problem with a wave of a keyboard, just like my father seemed at the time. Of course, I know now that that is a bit of a lofty ideal, but my respect for programming as a whole has never left me. At the age of 15, I decided to become a programmer. I remember vividly the moment things began to "click" together after weeks of struggle self-teaching. I was able to understand the basic concepts of procedural programming: if statements, loops, and functions. My first "job" as a programmer was programming for my high school robotics club. As programming lead and robot driver, I learned practical applications of both Java and LabVIEW. Programming in both these languages also gave me an appreciation for the wide universe of understanding that is software development, and how different paradigms can shape your view of the problem solving landscape. The second phase of my programming career arose from my experience in robotics. My programming mentor saw my quick progress in understanding software development, and offered an internship at Mentor Graphics during my Senior year of high school. This lead to a string of summer internships at both Mentor and other companies, where I learned both applications and full stack development.In college I decided to broaden my understanding even further, taking an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree. I learned the very basis of hardware and software development, from the analog characteristics of transistors to digital design and assembly programming. Combined with my internships, I had a broad understanding of the entire software development stack.Despite the many years and the variety of experience leading up to this point, I still feel that I have barely scratched the surface of the software development landscape. Like I was at age seven, this drives me to learn even more.