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Nick Swaine
Nick Swaine

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How I became a developer

My path to becoming a developer was wildly different than most. Growing up I was privileged to have had access to technology, including a dedicated line for dial-up internet.
And I had supportive parents. I had a strong love of technology, mainly as "this is neat" but never at a deep understanding of what was happening.
Nevertheless, my passion in my youth was reading. I devoured book upon book - mainly fantasy fiction, history (incl. popular history), and philosophy. Most of my brain cycles were spent thinking about what happened in the past.
This continued through my studies up to grad school. I have many passions in life and what began to emerge for me was a love of information itself. I obtained a BA in History from Flagler College, and when approaching graduation I decided to do more school.
I decided to follow in my mother's footsteps. She is a librarian, though now an administrator for FSU. I applied and was accepted to FSU's iSchool to pursue my MLIS.
During my graduate education I had the opportunity to work for the school's Help Desk -> performing tier 1 support for faculty and staff. This is where my love of technology resurfaced.
Following graduation I took a position as Help Desk tech for a small RFID company in Orlando and climbed ranks to Director of Operations for the company's hardware distribution child company.
It didn't get me close enough. I had developed a passion for coming up with ways to connect users to information. So I got a job as an analyst for a custom software firm.
Over the years since I have been working my way to a deeper understanding of how the things we build work, and with strong support by my company I have been able to push forward with my technical learning. Also I have been very fortunate to have some of the best colleagues.
And have been able to get to a point where I'm performing significant development tasks with the help of the team. I do humbly acknowledge the good luck and fortune I have encountered and hope to give back.
Part of this giving back has been my position as Adjunct Professor for FSU in the same school in which I received my MLIS. The last four years I've been teaching Usability Analysis, doing my part to make user interactions just a bit better.
The biggest thing I've come to understand is that those of us in technology usually have an interesting, if not rambling, path to where we are now. So that's my [brief] story.

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