Hello! I'm Sean Hagen, a geek dad who loves programming. I've been a professional software developer for over 16 years now -- and a computer nerd for far longer.

I've been interested in computers since I was a kid and my parents bought an Apple IIc. At some point they bought an IBM PC that came with Gorillas, a video game where you play as a gorilla throwing bananas at another gorilla. I got my first taste of programming by modifying the source code so that my gorilla threw much harder and the AI player threw much worse. Yes, my first achievement as a programmer was to hack a video game to make it easier.

After that, my next taste of programming was in high school. In grade 11, I encountered Linux for the first time, along with Perl. I ended up building a character generator for D&D 3.5 that could randomly generate characters from any of the races in the Players Handbook. It was a spaghetti code mess, but it worked! I lost the source code for that at some point -- which honestly is probably for the best. It was not easy to read.

After that I kept learning and playing around with programming on my own, learning some bits of C++, Java, and PHP while finishing high school and starting college. In college I enjoyed the networking class where I got to play with Cisco routers & switches, which has since come in handy now that I've got a homelab!

Despite not finishing college, I did end up getting a job as a developer through a ridiculous chain of a friend who know someone who know someone ( with some of those folks being on opposite sides of the country ). In the interview, the lead developer who was interviewing me told me "well, you don't have any experience but you sound like you know what you're talking about" -- and gave me a two-week contract. That was how I started my two years at Zeros2Heroes Media, helping to build a mini social network in PHP!

Since then, I've worked at a few other places. I've moved from PHP to Ruby, and then from Ruby to Go -- my current favorite language.

At the moment most of my time is taken up by work and baby, so I don't have much spare time to work on personal projects. However, if you want to read about some of the stuff I've done for previous places I've worked, my LinkedIn page is a good place to read about the stuff I've done for other companies.