Converting from Lurker to User

Hi Steemit! I finally decided to stop being a lurker and introduce myself!

My name is Jason. I was introduced to Steemit by the good folks at @blocktrades back in October of 2016!

Brief History About Me

I grew up in a very small town in Southwestern Virginia (less than 150 people within the town limits). As you can imagine, technology doesn't really exist in a place like that, so when I got my first real computer and access to dial up internet at the age of 13, I was blown away. I learned as much as I could about how things worked, mainly by tinkering around and learning what I could from online articles. By my senior year in high school, I knew more than the system admins did, to the point where the teachers would stop calling them when they had issues and just come find me instead.

I attended college at Virginia Tech where I also worked part time as a systems administrator while earning my degree in Computer Science. After graduation, I decided it was time to spread my wings a bit and accepted a job offer with a DoD contractor as a software engineer in the Washington DC suburbs. Unfortunately it turned out that I didn't much care for living in that area so I accepted a job back down in my college town and returned to Blacskburg for a couple of years where I worked as a software engineer and later as an application engineer for a small company that developed tools for engineering design and analysis.

During those two years, I started traveling and fell in love with it. I also fell in love with the west coast of the US and wound up moving out there for about 3 years before returning back to Blacksburg yet again to be closer to my family.

My Interests

As I mentioned above, I love traveling and have also become quite the aviation geek. This also led me to getting into and becoming obsessed with flight simulation so most of my blog posts will probably be about traveling and flying virtual planes :-P

My Best Advice

Life isn't fair, but don't give up and don't give in. Don't be defined by your circumstances, be defined by how you handle them. If you need help, ask for it! There is zero shame in reaching out when you need help. I sincerely wish it hadn't taken me 29 years to learn that.

Wrapping Up

I'm excited to be on Steemit and to watch it grow as a platform. Blockchain technology is very interesting to me and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here and meeting the wonderful people in this community!