Welcome to My Summer Studios.  This is the very first post in my new adventure into something new and different than what I’ve done professionally for the last 15+ years.  I can say this…it’s all new and scary and overwhelming, but absolutely exciting and I want to share some of my experiences as I go through this journey and maybe provide some feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and maybe get some feedback from the readers along the way.

Lets start with a little about myself.  I’ve been in technology and gaming pretty much my whole life.  I knew very early on that I wanted to make games when I grew up.  The first games I can remember were one of the one-off hand-helds you might find at a Toys-R-Us.  Eventually I got an upgrade to this watch that had Pac-Man on it.  I was on that thing all the time and got very far.  Now I don’t know if I broke any records, but I do remember being very good at it.  I found out what a computer was when I was 9 and started programming around 11 or 12 in GW-BASIC when my parents got our first computer – an IBM Aptiva.  I completely fell in love with programming because it opened up a whole new world of possibilities.  I was creating animations using math and making explosions.  It was one of the most exciting things to ever enter my life.  Over middle-school and high-school my horizons expanded from GW-BASIC to BASIC to Visual-Basic, C++, and any number of programming languages.  I just wanted to learn it all.  For me the language was relatively arbitrary.  It was always the logic that was the important part.

Early into my college career, I got introduced to ‘Networking’.  At the time I had no idea what it was or what part it would play on my life.  While I was going to college for my Computer Science degree, I was also taking classes on the weekend for this thing called a ‘MCSE’ (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer).  I ended getting MCSE-NT certified and that kickstarted a career in technology that I was never expecting.  That certificate landed me my first IT job as a PC Technician and it turned out I was very good at problem solving and picking up new technologies very quickly.  Over the years, that PC Tech job evolved into many different roles from system engineer to network engineer, network architect, consultant and manager of network architecture.  It’s been a career that most people would dream of.  Job security is never a thing that I’ve had to worry about.  Networking is something I love and will always love and hopefully be good at and possibly will always be a part of my life.  That brings us to now.

My Summer Studios is the long forgotten dream I’ve wanted to pursue since before I learned to type on a keyboard.  It’s an indie game and app studio focused on iOS and Android mobile platforms.  The blog is a way for me to document my growth and my successes and failures and hopefully help others looking to follow a similar path.  Over the next year, I will have many more posts on things like how I started, what I had to go through to get apps built/published, costs involved, and probably some things on networking 🙂