Justin Bowen is TonsOfFun

Born and raised on the peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was fortunate to be exposed to both business and technology at a very young age. Video games were a huge influence on my interest in computers and programming. I used to play games like DOOM, Quake, Hexen, and Duke Nukem 3D at my dad’s office with the tech support crew at the end of the work day.

My dad was a huge role model and positive influence throughout my childhood, education, and career. He was my first soccer coach and my first boss. When I was 8 or 9 my first personal computer had an Intel Pentium III with 512MB of RAM. My dad had me install all of the components and upgrade my graphics card (to play newer games like Half-Life) with an ATI Rage 32MB GPU and a huge (for the time) 80GB IDE HDD. We continued playing video games like Halo, Call of Duty, and PUBG.

At 15 I tested out of high school, started college, and started my career working tech support. While simultaneously enrolled in college Java programming methods and data structures classes, tech support gave me an opportunity to learn from the user experience. Working customer facing phone support gave me exposure to people across the country with varying degrees of technical literacy and cultural backgrounds. I was able provide end to end support software bugs from documenting them on the phone to resolving them with the developers.

Java and Microsoft SQL Server was the first tech stack I worked on, but I was intrigued by the OpenSource software community. I played with different Linux distros and found Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) quickly came to love Ruby on Rails.