I did a few things in my younger days - I used to like playing MUDs, and one day a few of my college friends wanted to create our own. So we created a fairly unknown MUD called "Faereal" which still happens to be used as my domain name for my personal stuff!

I was lucky enough to have a good friend and neighbour down the road who ran ExNet [1], who provided me with space to host my first server, and oh boy looking back, I am surprised I didn't blow everything up! [2] - Windows 98 connected directly into the internet, with a fairly terrible firewall and some random remote control software I found!.

Eventually, though another MUD, we were donated a more up-to-date box, which ran Linux, and we hosted that MUD and the Faereal MUD for a while, eventually adding in my own DNS server, website hosting (PHP), and that is how I ended up hosting friends websites.

That turned into a hobby where I started to write my own PHP, started helping firstly helping out on a game called "PhaseOne" which was essentially a copy of a game we were all playing at the time called "Planetarion" [3] -- (OMG As I looked for this, its still running!). Part of this code I created a "Team based chat area", which eventually became the primary base for something that has taken over nearly 20 years of my life.

The code became the custom-written forum code behind DDR:UK, a Dance Dance Revolution fan website for the UK, which through the founders we created the "official" Sim Packs for DDR simulators such as DWI [4] and Stepmania [5]. This eventually moved into us working at events such as the London MCM ComicCon [6], where we bought in actual DDR arcade machines, including a Stepmania run DDR Machine that used to sit in the Namco Station in Central London on the South Bank. (I would love to say it was a world first, but there was one group in the US that had a temporary setup... I would like to hope we are the world first permanent money-making one :D)

That got me into running a Japanese Culture Festival called Tokonatsu [7] which got me into learning AWS. This festival has now been running for 20 years!

So all in all, how did this help:

* Interviews, it's a great story to tell, and I always get a lot of fun looks!

* Experience, from hardware, to networking, to early days of internet, software, hosting etc etc. I went thought a LOT of sleepless nights when I was younger sorting this out, gave me a whole bunch of experience that I would never would have had.

* Networking, still talk to a lot of people today, and these people are key for where I am.

Honestly, the owner of ExNet, I couldn't have done any of this, if he hadn't of started me on the right path.

EDIT: Totally forgot to explain where I am now! So with all this, through support tech, manager of of datacentres, through lead engineers, etc etc... I am now the AWS Practice Lead for my company, a Principle Consultant, and I am writing this in the airport on the way back from AWS Re:Invent 2023 :D

So yeah, that is my story! Hope someone does eventually read it :D

[1] https://www.exnet.com/

[2] https://static.colinbarker.me.uk/img/blog/2020/07/faereal-se...

[3] http://www.planetarion.com/

[4] http://dwi.ddruk.com

[5] https://www.stepmania.com/

[6] https://www.mcmcomiccon.com/global/en-us.html

[7] https://www.tokonatsu.org.uk