I grew up with geeky interests but amongst an athletic, more mainstream crowd. I wanted chemistry sets and microscopes for christmas but also a new BMX bike. What's hilarious is that I'm exactly the same way today. In kindergarten, I used to go to the whiteboard and draw panels and buttons and pretend they controlled my spaceship. About 6 years ago, I had a job doing user interface prototyping where I drew panels and buttons on a whiteboard. One day, I had a flashback to kindergarten and made the connection. I started laughing out loud in front of the customer.

But I suppressed my geekiness growing up. My dad was a salesman and my family didn't have a single engineer in it. Me and my siblings were adopted so I can attest that my parents had no "engineer" genes in them (though, when I found my birthmom, I discovered lots of engineers in the family). I played sports all through highschool. In college, I did the fraternity thing but it wasn't until I was working that the geek started creeping in and within about 7 years, the transformation was complete. But I still shock people when the learn that I actually write code because they typically assume I'm a business guy. It's helped my career a lot.


Anywhere is walking distance if you have the time -Steven Wright