I’m Paul Giberson, I love trying to contain the impossible.
I have always been a fan of technology. I can remember my family's first computer at 5 years old, an IBM PCjr. All I can recall with that computer is playing games that were inserted via cartridges.
As I got older I was exposed to more complex games that my Grandpa would play. Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Sim City, Might and Magic, Silent Service, Eye of the Beholder, and many many more.
Growing up, my friends and I played computer games all the time. One of our favorites was EverQuest, and online MMORPG. I spent a year after graduating jobless, playing a lot of EQ. After starting a full-time job I realized I did not have much time to play the game, and felt lost with what to do with the game. I soon discovered an online marketplace where I could sell accounts and in-game items for real money. Unfortunately with every sale the auction site needed a cut, so I needed a way to keep all of the money. Exploring this idea, I learned basic HTML and listed items for sale with PayPal links on my free ISP shared hosting. From that point on I was enamoured with the web and web development.
Fast forward a few months I was attending Mesa Community College and started working on my Associate's degree in web development. After graduating, I did not see the industry (naively) for web development so when I transferred to Arizona State University I decided to work on my Bachelor's in Computer System Administration.
After graduating ASU I started as a system administrator at Socious (2008), an online community platform. I was initially responsible for migrating from colocated servers to this new thing called The Cloud. We first went to a company called ServePath and then quickly had to pivot to Slicehost. Some point in the future Slicehost was aquired by Rackspace and we were there for many moons.
At Socious, I was quickly transitioned to a developer after I built a web UI on top of our servers for VCS management and a bunch of other automated tasks that were super cumbersome to execture manually. I spent eight years at Socious growing with the company from 6 employees to over 50 when they were acquired by Higher Logic. I worked at Higher Logic for a year before realizing my desire to work in smaller companies and where my work can have larger impact.