I started in web design and publishing in 2003. I created my first website with freewebs.com (now webs.com) It was a toy camera photo gallery. I scanned my 35mm photos and published them on the website. I started marketing the site seriously in 2004 and by 2005 the site was recieving over 100,000 visitors per month and on its best month recieved 595,000+ pageviews. Did a great deal of SEO work on the site and it started to show up on Google for searches like "Oregon Photographs". The site hovered around 100,000 on Alexa with jumps to about 40,000 on good days. I was able build a strong PR5 on Google with something like 35,000 backlinks. I realized I was kinda good at this SEO stuff and started building new sites to sell link space to SEO firms for profit. This was a nice part time income. If I had it to do over again I would have kept doing web publishing instead of getting back into construction.
In 2006 I played a nice little prank on Google and made my site rank #1 for "The most visited site on the internet". Just to prove that search engine rankings are prone to manipulation. While Google cleaned up the search engine algorithms since then and it's a lot harder to spam your way to the top of the SERPS it is still possible to create an Organic presense through SEO best practices (honest hard work). I've done a lot of work for non-profits and small business startups over the last 5 years. Most of it I have not been paid for. I work in skilled labor fields from 2006 to 2010 and kept web publishing as a hobby.
In 2011 I found myself unemployed and I needed something to pass the time until I found full time work again. I took decided to take up computer programming. It was by chance I was search through some videos on YouTube for clips from the movie Basic. When I found a series of BASIC tutorials. I decided to learn how to program in BASIC. I downloaded QB64 which is a fully C++ compatible BASIC compiler. It's basically an open source clone of Microsoft QuickBASIC. Anyhow I worked my way through the tutorial series and learned what there was to learn there. I then turned my attention to Visual BASIC 2010 and learned that. I was spending a good deal of time online and I became a target for hackers for whatever reason. My system was PDOS's serveral times. During the next several months I started learning about security topics. I started learning the Linux operating system. I bought an older computer at thrift store for $11 hard drive not included. I installed the hard drive and downloaded and installed Ubuntu 10.04 and started learning Ubuntu. Shortly after I bought a new laptop and installed Ubuntu on my old laptop as well. I had no idea what I was doing for the first several months and honestly I didn't even know how to connect it to the internet. I had some shitty broadcom chipset for which the drivers were not included. I had to figure out how install the drivers. I read through Linux For Dummies. I highly recommend reading through the For Dummies books if you don't know anything a subject. After that I read through a programming manual for Linux. Then I started reading administration related books. At this point I started to have a clue what I was doing with computers.
In 2012 I had my last negative experience with Windows. My Windows 7 laptop crashed and I had no way of recovering my data. I knew enough about Linux to install and run it as my primary operating system. I haven't gone back. It still fix Windows PCs for friends. But I don't use windows anymore. Honestly I don't miss Adobe Photoshop or Visual Studio enough to use Windows. At point I was still progamming as a hobby. There was one BASIC compiler for Linux but it was a pain in the ass to track down all of the dependencies to make it work. So after a spending an entire weekend trying to install it I shelved BASIC and started learning C++. I worked my way through about 70 tutorials and realized I need to learn some networking related stuff. I found some really good sockets programming tutorials in Java so I went ahead and learned Java.
By summer of 2012 I had started learning to hack. It mostly stemmed from curiosity. I wanted to see if my wireless router as secure as the installer told me it was. It wasn't. I downloaded a copy of backtrack 5r2 and and script called wifite.py and proceded to own the wireless access point in a little over an hour. I started learning the aircrack tool suite and tools like reaver wps. It wasn't very long I was pretty good at hacking wireless routers. I figured out how to make them more secure in the process. This is the important thing. The hacking part is more a fun biproduct of curiosity about information security related topics.
In spring of 2013 I started working with a startup information security firm. We had a nice little penetration testing lab where we worked on a lot of wireless auditing. Then I went back to college for a bit. I got bored of that and decided to travel.
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