Roderick Barnes

Since he was 5 years old, he has been fascinated by computers. Why? It goes back to his first epiphany concerning technology: computers are more than a little cool because they have the ability to follow instructions. Although he was keenly interested in computers it would be another 9 years before he would get the chance to work with them. At 14 he was accepted into the PREP program in San Antonio, Texas. During his studies at UTSA, he was introduced to mainframes and BASIC. His poor grandparents often had to drive across town to pick him up at the end of the day. He kept missing the last bus because he could not break away from the thrill of writing programs in BASIC. He was hooked. Why? It follows his second epiphany: the real limitations of the computer are in his head… not the hardware. He was hooked on the thrill of solving problems using logic, creativity, … and computers.

After college, he got his first job writing software for a company that sold property management solutions. It took a while for him to get excited about that work. Between working on reports, and features, and implementing fixes, he had two pet projects. In one project, he created a utility that would analyze source code and create call trees. In his other project, he worked on understanding how to write interpreters.