I would love to be able to say that I had dreamed of being a web designer/developer/creator since I was really young, but when I was really young, the web was really young; CSS1 was the thing and it was badly supported and while the dialup modem was connecting, I already thought my dad was boring and wanted to go outside and play.
At the end of 2008 I was graduating homeschool and decided to present my years work to the catchy "Queensland Government's Department of Education Home-schooling Unit" on a CD with a web-interface. Only I didn't have any idea how to do that. So I obtained Dreamweaver and dove (dived?) right in. It was a success and I just loved the power of a website as a presentation medium. What I didn't love what was the opacity between the WYSIWYG editor and the 'raw materials' I was manipulating. Having been home-schooled, university entry required taking a slightly different route which I completed by doing some distance units with Open Universities, one of which was an Introduction to Web Design. I loved it - as in I worked at it in my spare time. I swapped out Dreamweaver for Notepad++ and enthusiastically built my first project site which I have included in my portfolio because I think it's quite good.
I spent time living overseas in Chile as part of an exchange program studying linguistics in Spanish, and travelled all over South America, hiking, couch-surfing, jet-setting and hostelling from the Tierra del Fuego in the Patagonian far-south to Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast in Colombia. After that I lived in Medellín, Colombia for one and half years where I worked teaching English to web developers, among other groups. Go figure.
Fast-foward to now. I've graduated my non computer science degree and worked as a front end developer with Simplify Solutions. Outside of tech I love learning through listening to podcasts on topics like human psychology and self-improvement, the philosophy of ethics, nutrition etc., all of which are minefields but that affect us all.
When I need to get out of my head, I get out on my bike and climb a mountain or go to some outer-lying town I don't know, or try and find knew bike trails.