My name is Paul Otis. I am 32 years old and have been messing around with computers since grade school. My journey into software started a bit unconventionally when I discovered I enjoyed playing with game code more than I did playing the game itself. My family were not that thrilled that games were teaching me things that classrooms weren’t (like playing with the computers BIOS was a bad idea…) but they worked with it.

When I got into MMORPGs around middle school, I likewise discovered it was best to figure out what everyone’s goals were and ensure everyone got what they wanted out of any team up. This trait earned me many friends online and more than a few friends in real life. Everyone was much more cooperative with one another when they knew we all would walk away with what we came for. It could have been an item drop, an achievement, level grinding, or just figuring out how to use a new skill. When everyone’s individual objectives were met, I felt I had won the ultimate victory.

High school I found my preferred game style as an extension of my experience in MMOs. Tactical and Strategy games. Every unit has strengths and weaknesses. How you use them in conjunction with one another allows you to circumvent a superior force. Many things in life get overlooked. Underestimating the importance of even one person, or one detail can often lead to a painful result. I strived to ensure my opponents learned that the hard way.

College is when I started really figuring things out about myself. A million repetitive mundane tasks make the days blur together. I prefer having a goal to accomplish or I make my own. I approach problems as if each is a puzzle to solve and any problem can have dozens of solutions. My preferred approach is inspired from Albert Einstein.

Einstein: “If I were given an hour in which to do a problem upon which my life depended, I would spend 40 minutes studying it, 15 minutes reviewing it and 5 minutes solving it.”

I find that many people see problems with one of a few mindsets’ dependent on their individual strengths. Persistence, Effort, Experience, asking for help, researching what others did to solve it, Creative solutions, Collaboration, looking at desired outcomes. Ultimately any problem can be approached in hundreds of ways. In most cases there is no solution better than properly defining the root cause of a problem.