First, I'll describe myself from a male perspective:

I am a hacker.

I like to figure out how things work. I like to fix things that are broken. I like to make people smile. I really like excellent surprises.

I have been taking things apart since I can first remember. One of my first memories was as two or three year old taking the bulb out of the lamp at the side of my bed and placing a nickel inside. It blew the fuse and freaked my parents out. My first looks at complex machinery were old broken 8mm cameras. Also my first failures. Couldn't put them back together.

I am really really good at jumping into complex problems that are completely f*cked up, where no one, and I mean no one, understands the complete system and then figuring out how to fix it while improving it and keeping it running. That's my specialty. Bringing the dead to life again. Restoring sanity where only madness lay.

I am a change strategist.

Started programming at 16 on the TRS-80. I learned enough to get a job without having done anything other than read the manual and play around a bit on the demo computer at Radio Shack. I literally learned on the job.

My programming job was writing simulation software for algorithmic commodity trading systems. This was in 1981, way before algo-trading was popular.

Landed a job working for the most famous trader in the world at the time, known as the Prince of the Pits, Richard Dennis. Traded for a few years, made ridiculous sums. Ridiculous sums. But I was bored. I wanted to get back into software.

The group later became famous as "The Turtles." I later wrote a book about the experience called Way of the Turtle that became a bestseller and available in about 15 different languages.

Started developing software on the Mac in 1985, purchased the rights to a database developer library product called InsideOut. Made it much faster and better. Had fun doing that. It was the number one database engine on the Mac for many years.

Got involved in the object-oriented community in the days of MacApp. Presented at the Frameworks conference several years in the late 80s.

Once asked Jean Louis Gassee in front of a few thousand people at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference why Apple had not had any breakthrough products nor had the OS improved in years, since the Color Mac really.

He didn't have a good answer. Everyone knew it.

Put an SQL engine on top of our database engine for a project for NorTel for the largest mobile sales automation (now they call it CRM) project in the world at the time. Ended up taking over the whole project because we did good work and the other consultants didn't. They had a complete mess and we fixed it slowly but steadily. About four or five of the engineers from the other consulting firm were really good. We hired them. Two of them ended up eventually leaving to work on this new internet browser thing. They had been friends with Marc Andreeson at the University of Illinois, one