Rob Sharp
I started messing around with computers and electronics at the tender age of 4, where a family friend - an electronic engineer - gave me a ZX81 that he'd built himself. Thus, the seed was planted and from that point on I grokked all things geek. I've been through more computers than I 'd care to count, and through primary and secondary school, I was the one the teachers asked to fix the school computers.
I followed a path of Electronics and CS at uni, nearly became a rock star, but graduated jaded and pathless. Many of my classmates went on to work for banks and corporates, but that wasn't for me. I took time out to travel, and whilst working in a Sydney Internet Cafe, I realised what I really enjoyed - the web. Working late nights gave me time to relearn HTML and familiarise myself with PHP, and after meeting the girl who became my wife and the mother of my bub-to-be, I returned home to Scotland, where serendipity landed me a job selling phones for Orange, where I transferred internally to become a developer for their mobile platform.
Love got the better of me, and I moved myself to Australia after 2 years of working in mobile web. I had a handful of coding jobs in Sydney, but just over 2 years ago I interviewed for a role with a well known Australian music website. I got excited in the interview, starting talking about social networking and AJAX, and when my interviewer grinned, I knew I'd found somewhere special, more than just a job.
Now I work with a fantastic team who push the boundaries of what people expect from their websites, and with one of our sites almost doubling its already substantial membership in 6 months, I know people are digging what we do.
Currently I have two web paths; my work time is becoming more concerned with software architecture and scaling our sites to push the boundaries of what you can do with 3 nasty servers, but my play time is learning the joy of being a one-man-dev-team through coding in ruby-on-rails. The best of both worlds.
I have a polymorphic (read: sex unknown) baby due in December, and they will grow up in a web world far far different from what we have now. For me, thats very *very* exciting.
This is me, and I work in, on, and around, the web.