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Doug Hall

Hello. I'm Doug from Montgomery, AL. I've been learning to program for going on -- oh heck, my brain hurts to do the math. I first learned to program on my Dad's Epson QX-10. I used dBase II to help me track and bill my lawn care customers. At the time, I never considered it a career option. It was more of a necessity, albeit a fun one. In college, I cut my teeth programming on 80 column punch cards and quickly moved on to green and amber 80-column ASCII monitors like my Dad's computer had. At the time, 5MB of storage was considered half-decent. I was the Apple Student Representative at Auburn University for my last two years there. I bought 150 shares of Apple back when they were virtually penny stocks. I sold them all WAAAY too soon. So much for my career in financial counseling. :-/

After college, I did a year and a half stint for a private contractor, writing logistics software for the Standard Systems Center (the government), using C, Pro*SQL, and sprinkling in a little PCL for printing forms on HP laser printers. After that, I was hired to teach Ada for a workforce development agency. I wound up never teaching that class, because our requirements changed, but I stayed on with them and became their database programmer. I've now been using a database language (really, an integrated system) called 4th Dimension or "4D", 4d.com/. I use a third-party plugin called Active4D for web development. I have learned several other languages over the years. I've only used a handful of them for production code, however. I've enjoyed short (and fruitless) forays into WebObjects, Java, Spring. More recently, I've used Ruby and Rails for a few projects at work. Right now, I'm learning Elixir and Phoenix as well as Vue.js and friends. My day job still pays me to do 4D, and I'm quite fond of eating, so I don't have the time I'd like to really get productive with them.

For my next career, I'm considering writing my biography on every computer-related forum in existence -- without copy and paste. It probably won't pay much, but like everything else, I'll monetize it later. People will be mesmerized.