Justin.Jones - Professional Profile

I started out in life as a musician. I started playing the violin at age 4, and I've never really stopped. Even when I fully believed my life would be spent as a musician, I had a fondness for computers.

At age 11 my parents bought our first computer, a Texas Instruments TI 99/4A. This is where I learned BASIC, spending countless hours typing in game source code from the back of magazines and various books.

I began seriously learning about the IBM when I was 16 and accidently trashed MS-DOS 4 on my Dad's new 386 trying to remove 688 Attack Sub. The phone call to tech support went something like "I've gotta get it working, my Dad's gonna KILL me!".

After a couple years of living the musician life in college, I found it wasn't condusive to maintaining scholarships. I took a few years off, regrouped, and refocused on programming, finally completing a degree.

I've been actively working in the IT field as a programmer since 1997, having just been sacked from my warehouse job at Elek-Tek when it declared bankruptcy. The first part of my career was as a C++ programmer, with a brief foray into Java in 2000, moving into ASP web development in 2001 and C# ASP.NET development in 2003.

I'm a Microsoft MCP, and still actively participate in the local music community.