Generally speaking, I feel uncomfortable talking to anyone about myself. It may seem a bit hollow to say in the about-me section of a website bearing my own name, but its true.
My name is... Joey Kimsey and I am a 34 year old web-developer. I think it would be fair to say I am a full-stack developer though I find myself working on and gravitating towards backend development more. Over the past decade I have moved from professionally designing popup advertising for major car manufacturers, to working for the CDC in a major time of crisis, to harassing AI to spread information to entrepreneurs in other languages. I love this technology and I love what we can do with it.
Things always get a bit awkward when I tell people I am 33 but I've been doing this for 20 years, but its true. When I was still in single-digits, we got our first PC, with windows 98. I won't lie to you about remembering the specs, but I can tell you that it changed the world for me. I believe we had internet access through our phone provider before, but eventually we wound up on AOL and the world expanded in front of me. There were websites for everything and it was all new. They were still talking about the internet like it was something that was going to happen, but I was already living through it, it was already changing the world around me.
As many children do, I became curious and wanted to know how the internet worked. I found out I could have my onw little spot on the internet with lycos or angelfire. I learned about html, images, pearl scripts, and I even made webpages for everything I liked: runescape, skateboarding, vampires. Eventually I really wanted to make something so my friends could send me messages on the website. At the time, pearl was pretty complicated, not many people used it, and it was heavily limited on free hosting. I needed to find a different way, so I started searching and eventually stumbled into php.
Once I found php, I fell in love with programming. Not only was the web new and fresh, I knew how it worked. I had a magical superpower that no one else did. Over the years I built dozens of projects including working for many local business-owners from a young age. I eventually went to college for computer science, where I learned that java is a terrible language and that I was more interested in building than learning how to build, so I dropped out. After working several jobs over the following years, I was given the opportunity by a close friend to move out of my small town. When I moved to Atlanta, I finally found an employer willing to give me a shot and my resume picks up from there.