A former electronic design engineer, I moved into software by way of coding for embedded processors. In the 90s, I joined a friend starting an exciting, get-rich-quick internet startup, XFI. Our original focus was software-assisted decision making using fuzzy-logic inference networks. Our original application, CarDecide, was written in C++ (and took forever to compile). When Java Servlets came along, with garbage collection and console stack traces, we never looked back. We haven`t gotten rich but we`ve done a lot of interesting, innovative work, made some users really happy, and had a good time doing it. ©