Ask HN: Who's going to afford my degree? 
TL;TR I’m a dropout. I’ll tell my history from the beginning until now and why I’m going to return to the university and how you can help me ;)

Everyone’s life is a puzzle, but this puzzle is so big that you find the missing pieces only when you reach a certain age and you can see the whole picture. This happens to everyone, you may have regrets, or even unrealized dreams and maybe my history will help you too.

When I was 14 the world was good but pretty limited we haven’t internet or wikipedia and we were creating good stuff with computers, This history didn’t happened on 70’s or 80’s it happened on 1997

I didn’t had a computer I learned pascal by reading programming books at the library(I couldn’t afford the library’s loan deposit), and testing on the computer on next day. My learning process almost mimicked the old time when people used to program on punch cards and running routines during small amount of time.
I started to work as a packer on a local grocery store to earn money and buy my first computer, and I did it piece by piece, first I got this mother board, memory, processor and a shitty power supply that almost cost me six months of salary when it burned during a lightstorm. I didn’t have enough money to buy a hard drive so I started to load things up on floppy disks with DOS and Pascal. I wrote almost all software that I needed using Pascal. Writing computer software become my main life objective and I was pretty happy with that.

On day on my job at grocery store I was able to fix a tax bug in a Delphi project and got my first promotion. I was 16 my manager started to fill my head with information, he was the regular IBM/Norton guy and pushed me into the University. Once I started taking classes at college I quit from work and started to push really hard to become a great computer scientist. I was pretty good on calculus and physics and also was doing great on other classes. My dad was affording my college but one year before my graduation things become difficult at home, in the end we had no money or food and I decided to quit university and get a job to afford my family.

I move out form my hometown to live on one of the biggest cities in the world, and actually I did really great on CS even without a degree. I travelled across south america working with different peoples and projects and was earning money to support my family. I started with open source software around 06 and even got a full time job at RedHat to work on this open source project. I spent about 2 years working full time from home, but I decide to quit to chase a whole new level on my career.

I had this passion for computer science and I started to work doing Machine Learning algorithms at my job trying to solve particular problems. Actually I never quit studying, I aways read books about advanced topics on CS, learned Lisp, improved my english ( sorry I’m not a native speaker =) ) and did other things like playing piano and guitars.

Right now I have this great job working with great people, doing great products but I still miss something, I completely missed one of my life’s main objective that is earn a degree. I have this crush for academics and I thing I could be a more valuable teacher than software engineer. Recently I started to hire younglings and teach then how to become great developers.

Next year I’m going to enroll on an University and start pursue my diploma on CS, then a master's degree and maybe a PhD on machine learning. Such objective requires some sacrifice and I will probably quit my job and start doing part time programming contracts.

I’m 28 lead software engineer with strong background on large scale systems (my current projects delivery almost 3.2 billions requests by month).

I have some infrastructure background using EC2, Rackspace, Chef (I eat my own dod food) I know what happens with a large scale ruby project during a slashdot effect and how to prevent complete failure.

I also worked implementing delivering a web semantic capable CMS with a bunch of knowledge extractors and classifiers to increment news relationship and conversion.

I can work professionally with Java, Ruby, Python and even C. (I know R and Octave but not proficient)

I can speak English, Spanish and Portuguese.

I have this B1/B2 visa that allows me travel to US to meet with the team.

So I ask, is there anyone who can offer me a long term part time job to help me afford my degree? This is a lifetime opportunity to have a great software engineer who can help you boost your company =)

Ps: I’m using this trow away account so leave your contacts or website then I can send you my linkedin using my real name, Sorry for this inconvenience, but I don’t like people sneaking into my private life.

edited: some typos.