Name: Jon Canady
Location: Columbus, OH
Company: Innova Partners
I started coding initially because I dreamed of programming the next Doom. I had a great time learning C but it turns out Doom is really hard when you're just learning C. I had a blast, but nothing came of it. A few years later a friend who owned a comic book store wanted some software to put his inventory online, and that's how I started building practical software. It's super fun, and folks keep paying me, so I haven't stopped since.
Right now I'm working on a bunch of software (in Ruby, natch) for the Health Insurance world. Unless you're on Medicare, you probably haven't used anything I've written, but that's what my employer Innova Partners specializes in. One of our biggest clients is CoverMyMeds, a startup that's helping millions of people get approval for their drug prescriptions. It sounds boring but it's surprisingly not, and it's fantastic to be able to help people get needed medication.
When I'm not doing paid work, I dork around and occasionally give talks with the fine folks from the Columbus Ruby Brigade, and poke around with languages I don't use every day.
In the next ten years I'll probably be writing software from a touchscreen tablet that's really just a thin client to whatever servers are hosting my entire development and testing environment. Something tells me I'll still be using this futuristic technology to replicate a character terminal from the 1960s.