Growing Up Geek: Billy Smolen

The king has arrived.

Reading through some of the other pieces in the Growing Up Geek category, I've come to realize I'm younger than most Engadget contributors. Born in 1994, the internet has been a mainstay in my life. Growing up, the computer room, the affectionate name for my dad's office, was my kingdom and the spinnytwisty chair was my throne. And though our old Gateway was largely a glorified Snood machine, I was fascinated by how it was all possible.

Born and raised Jewish in the northern suburbs of Chicago, I experienced my first Christmas morning in the June of 1999; I awoke to find a strange looking repairman exiting my basement, followed by my parents. Little did I know, he had just 'installed' the Nintendo 64 that would become a focal point of my childhood (and college days). To that point, I had only experienced the joy of PC gaming, specifically everything and anything published from Humongous Entertainment.

My older sister and I spent hours playing that console and the oh-so-few games we had to chose from. When she grew tired of the games, I shared the passion with my best friend Ross. And when Ross received Ocarina of Time for his sixth birthday, the rest was history. Our allegiance to the Zelda series kept us busy for a number of years. Now, it is worth noting that I forced Ross to name the profile in OoT after me (Billy5 to be exact) – he still won't let me live that down.

He and I spent hours in our basements together playing through a variety of games, though the Zelda series occupied most of our time. If we got stuck in a video game, we would try to decipher the pictures in the cheat-manuals; of course, we couldn't actually read back then. When we got bored, we reverted to 'fixing' his dad's old Pachinko machine – unfortunately, we never achieved that goal. We even launched our own business at age six (with tremendous help from Ross' dad) by manifesting our own take on Pokemon cards in Microsoft Word. The result was a hand-made trading card, depicting a black and white stick figure, which we marketed and sold through a Microsoft Publisher website. We even had one sale, outside of our families! I hesitate to state that sale was actually addressed toward some sort of Ohio detainment center – not kidding. But at a quarter a pop, that was a bargain, right?

Ross and I continued to fuel each other's passion for technology, though only he went on to formally study computer science (at Washington University in St. Louis). Our interests weren't always perfectly aligned, and I would say my path was the riskier of the two. By 2004, I found myself frequenting a group of online forums (the Invisionfree community, for the initiated) despite a federal law prohibiting my use of such communication media: the COPPA. These message boards provided an opportunity to find more like-minded geeks that my primary schools seemed to lack. I successfully hid my age from my new-found online friends and was able to participate in discussions spanning a wide-variety of technologies and games.

I started to teach myself basic HTML and CSS through the Invisionfree platform. I was actively reading up on emerging technologies and plotting to launch my own web host (by means of a reseller package – I thought it was genius). I envied the technicians that occasionally came into our home and I glorified the geek's lifestyle. Middle school was a rough time (even Ross attended a different middle school in the same town), but these online communities and blogs became my safe haven. Yet for whatever reason, this passion of mine was something I was ashamed of and I did everything I could to hide it from just about anybody I came in contact with.

The social anxieties have certainly subsided, and I had a much better time in high school than I did in middle school (as I'm sure most would say). I don't know who I would really be without the geek inside me. It's a great feeling when you can say, with a high degree of certainty, that you truly know who you are at heart.

Though my interests have certainly evolved since my early teenage days, and my social skills are greatly improved, I'm still the same geek at heart. Ross and I started to freelance during our Junior year of high school, which led me to an interest in the consulting industry. Today, I'm a rising Senior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying Finance and Information Systems & Information Technology (ISIT). I'll be aiming for a career in the IT Consulting field, more specifically in Analytics, but I've always enjoyed creative writing. I'm not one to do multiple drafts, nor will I claim to have phenomenal writing expertise, but I look forward to actively contributing in this role and I applaud Engadget for engaging its audience in such a manner.

I'll definitely be taking a stronger interest in this role than I did in my athletic career.