Hello,

I am Marcus, also known by my online alias, Vi3GameHkr. Whether you look at either name, however, you probably have never even heard about me and don't really care.

I have been quite the tech-savvy boy for quite a while, but I'm not a huge hardware person (no matter how much I'd like to be, I just don't have the money and there is no such thing as the free hardware foundation) For years, I've used Windows.. In fact I've owned at one time every version of Windows since 95, excepting the early NT series, ME and any server editions.

Now, for the past year I have been getting more and more into Linux starting with Ubuntu and just recently I have started looking at new Distributions. So far I have only used the GNOME environment, but I am very interested in finally trying out the KDE environment, and I am also ready to get into developing on Linux (I do a little bit of C++ and Python on Windows) so exploring more distributions has entered my list of great interests.

My ultimate quest nowadays is to go where no man has gone before! I want to get a Computer Science degree from a university someplace (I'm looking at Colorado University in Boulder, CO, and Colorado School of Mines currently, plus a few other out-of-states) and then while maintaining a successful job to pull in the dough of survival, I want to contribute as much as possible to the Linux community, by filling software needs and replacing oudated and unmaintained software. I think it would also be cool to join the developer team of a popular distro, but I don't know what the commitment would be like for that, so it's a shot in the sky.

I guess I kind of just wrote a whole book. Enjoy.

Live long and prosper!

Welcome to LQ. You need not go to university to start developing free software. You can just start off with some small utilities that you need from time to time and allow users use it as well.

I aim to become a professional in the software development business (most likely game development since it's a popular field as of now), and I am fairly certain a computer science degree should suffice due to an amount of reading on the subject of college and game development, as well as talking to a few professionals I know.

I do understand that with corporations comes confidentiality and secrecy, which means I wouldn't be able to share my code with others, and I haven't worked out a solution around that except to pursue a different field or simply to find work with a company that supports open source products. If I were to pursue a different field I would either choose electrical engineering, or stick with computer science and find different work in computer-related fields.