I am first and foremost a programmer.  I always will be.  Every task I do and think I ask myself the question "can this be done by a computer?".  I have been this way a very long time now.  My family got our first computer when  I was ten, or early 1981.   An Osborne I (the original) and it was pretty much the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  It had the tiniest little screen and the largest keyboard, and I wanted to program it more than anything.  My mother was using it for her dissertation at the time, so I could only use it when she wasn't using it, or asleep.  So when she went running at 5:30am, I would be in her bedroom programming.  When I was in middle school, I took a typing class to help with my programming.  It was all girls aspiring to be secretaries, and I got major ribbing from the guys, but I did it for the "computer's sake".  I also skipped gym on a regular basis so I could spend time in the computer lab, which was luckily a computer lab in the middle of Silicon Valley (Palo Alto) and very well equipped with IBM XT's and even a Beta Macintosh (where we all laughed at the silly thing called a "mouse").  My friends and I lived, breathed and ate (or tried to) computers.  Then in 1984 I got an Apple IIc, which I used all the way through college (yes, I graduated in 1992, but by then I was using it as a VT52 terminal dialing into a Sun Sparc server at 2400 Baud.  My friends were still jealous because they had to walk to the computer lab.).

I went to the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.  In my opinion, it was one of the finest Engineering schools in the Ivy League.  Sometimes it is officially rated that way in the "school ratings books," sometimes not.  When I started there, I chose Electrical Engineering as my degree, because I cockily assumed I knew everything about programming.  Luckily, a required first year course for EE was CSE120, or Pascal.  I took it, laughing, since I'd been writing Pascal code for years.  After two weeks of the course, we were into totally unfamiliar territory for me (Recursion, Data Types, Linked Lists, big O notation, etc...) and I realized I was wrong and had much to learn.  But I'm not a quitter either, so I made all my EE electives CSE classes.  I actually loved both quite a bit.  Especially the digital electronics (go figure).  I petitioned the school and received a dual degree in EE and CSE.  I had to stay an extra semester to finish both senior design projects (they wouldn't let me combine them), but I took many grad classes that semester, so it was worth it.

Software was always my first love, so that's what I selected to do for my career.  It's infinitely more flexible than circuits, however I still love EE quite a bit, so you'll notice it in many of my hobbies (e.g. fixing arcade machines, designing a USB adapter, etc).

I won't list every job I've ever had here, because, being a consultant, there's been quite a few.  They're all on my resume, so check it out.  Here's a link: resume.  I've been around in this business now.  I've worked for some very large corporations (SAP, Lockheed Martin, GlaxoSmithKline, BankOne, JP Morgan, Magnavox) and I've worked for small startups, one of which is still limping around but the others were casualties of the the 2001 dot-com fiasco.

I've worked in a variety of industries (Banking, Aerospace, Defense, Insurance, Regulatory). 

I've been a consultant, architect, programmer, manager, Associate VP.

And although the projects are all vastly different, they all have one thing in common, they have software which need to be written by me!  And that's what keeps me happy.  I expect I'll be writing software until the very end, and hopefully people will always need it.  There's nothing like the satisfaction of writing a good piece of software, and being appreciated by your users.