My name is Matt Brooks and I am a 28 year old computer geek. I was born in Huntsville, Alabama and grew up in the shadow of NASA and Marshal Space Flight Center, which rests there.

Because of NASA, technology and computers have been part of my life since I was born. I was 6 when my family got it’s first computer, an Apple II+.

Next came the illustrious Commodore 64, which I got for christmas one year. Throughout my young childhood, my Commodore 64 was my games and entertainment. Many hours were lost by the joystick of this bad boy.

At age 12, I started tinkering with hardware. I got my first Personal Computer (PC) which I learned how to repair and upgrade. Very soon after, I was repairing, upgrading, and networking the computers at my father’s office. I taught myself Linux at age 16 and in 1997 I was named Huntsville High School’s Computer Repair Student of the year and served on the Huntsville City Schools Technology Council.

One of the highlights of my life was when I appeared in Carnegie Hall with my Middle School Choir. I was also an accomplished swimmer at Huntsville High School where I won several awards and lettered all four years.

In 1998, I entered Auburn University and started working at Auburn.net, a full service ISP (now part of earthlink.net) where I worked in technical support and system administration. During this time, I learned how to program in C.

Needing a break from school, I moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 2000 and worked for a small startup company named Infusion Technologies. There, I managed a group of web servers, email servers, and database servers as well as assisting the design team with their web projects. To help with the automation of my daily tasks, I taught myself how to program in PHP, ASP, Visual Basic, and Perl.

I returned to school and graduated from Auburn University with a concentration in Management Information Systems. I helped start a company, Net Leverage, where I worked on a suite of Web Enabled tools for web sites called “ProDigiTools”.

I currently work for Digium, Inc. as a software developer and IT guy.