All my life I have had affinity to electronics. As a kid I used to build simple electronic circuits and I went to a technical high school, in the electronic track. This is were I learned the basics of electronics and the love of everything digital ("you can do everything with only NAND gates"). After a few years of working as an electronic technician and loving it I decided to get more formal education. I ended up getting a degree in math (the program was 3 years compared to 4 years EE so it was a no brainer ;-)) and then additional degrees in computer sciences and computer engineering (my dissertation was about computational geometry aspects of PCB routing). My background in electronic is very useful in my career and have helped me working on a variety of disciplines from hardware design (board and HDL) and embedded software to, control systems, mobile systems and apps, EDA, internet technologies, and very large scale cloud systems and comptations. Kind of a jack of all trades, master of none.
These days I don't build as much hardware for the fun as I used to and would like, mostly because I can find outlet for the fire within in software. You can do quite a lot these days just by typing on a keyboard and moving the mouse, but I still love smell solder fume in the morning, really. I have a small lab at home, Weller solder iron, Hako desolder, Tek DSO, lab power supply, a small Fluke 107 multimeter, and a FLIR E4 on order. Trying to keep it manageable and simple.
Joined this site few weeks ago when I looked for multimeter reviews (ended up with the Fluke 107). It helped me reconnect with my electronic roots and I learn a lot for other people's postings and from Dave's videos, even little things such as how to optimize the shipping of thousands of PCB rulers (
http://youtu.be/kU2qmhzlc2o).