Hi, my name is Steve and I'm a recovering Advent-of-Code-aholic.

I am a software engineer of 25+ years professionally and approximately 35 years as a hobby. My parents bought a Commodore VIC-20 when I was about 8, and frankly I was hooked.

In those pre-internet days, things came with manuals. As an eager reader, this seemed like heaven to me. I could read a book which would teach me how to make the computer perform my bidding. I quite enjoyed writing programs to generate and solve mazes which, it turns out, would come in handy nearly 40 years later.

At the time, I was devouring the Usborne coding books, and the magazine Input.

The VIC-20 was a gateway drug and I progressed to a ZX-Spectrum +2A and then to a 386 PC.

I spent a lot of time writing clones or interpretations of other games that I couldn't afford to buy and enjoyed the writing as much as the playing the results with my friends.

Language-wise, I progressed from BASIC (on the VIC and Speccy) to Turbo Pascal on the PC (a revelation... breakpoints, variable watches, much wow.)

I also dabbled with Z80 and 386 assembly language to extract more performance from those low megahertz computers, but man, that stuff is not easy without proper reference material (remember, this was pre-internet.)

After the halcyon years, I went into programming professionally. Starting with a regression to Visual BASIC. Some dalliances with C, C++, Java, most modern (and not-so-modern) operating systems and also taking in web technologies along the way. I've also been fortunate enough to come across some interesting hardware during my travels.

Nowadays, my weapon of choice is C#/dotnet. I also am happy with most cloud technologies and database paradigms that are thrown in my general direction.

I've worked for small start-ups, multinational corporations and also done some consultancy work and contracting over the years.

Aside from coding, my other passions are cars and guitars.

I guess this unintentionally reads a bit like a CV or résumé, but I wanted to give some background as to how I managed to fall down this particular rabbit hole.

I am now a senior software engineer at Just Eat Takeaway, and this is where the addiction story begins...