Greg 1.0
Born in the Bronx. Grew up in upper middle class suburban New Jersey. College at Virginia Tech: went in a Computer Science major, came out with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies. College summers working at Walt Disney World, first at Cosmic Ray's Starlight Cafe, then at the world famous Jungle Cruise.
After college, went to work for Microsoft in their support division, developer support for IIS specifically. Wrote KB articles. Debugged classic ASP hangs and crashes. Learned the .Net Framework while in the 1.0alpha stages.
Left Microsoft, went on a grand tour of contractor jobs in North Carolina and New York City. While in NYC, got a call from Avanade. Made the jump from contractor to capital-C Consultant. Enjoyed having things like health insurance and paid vacation (that I rarely took, but still).
Greg 2.0
New York City, Summer 2006. I'd been working for Avanade for not quite a year, and was being convinced by management that I needed to join the newly formed and growing Information Worker practice. According to them, SharePoint was the next big thing and they needed some "real .Net developers" to join the team to work on a project using the latest beta version of MOSS 2007.
So, I did what I figured what was best for my career at the time and made the switch. Whether that was a good or bad decision would be enough for a series of blog posts, but over the last 7 years, it boiled down to working on insanely frustrating code for Really Good Money. Yes, I sold out, but it took me about 4 years to realize it.
In the past year or two, really since SharePoint 2013 became public knowledge, it became increasingly clear to me that time was short in the SharePoint world for expert-level .Net developers. I began to wonder if I'd made a wrong turn back in 2006, but those golden handcuffs were on tight; I wasn't going anywhere unless my hand was forced.
Then, my hand was forced.
Greg 3.0
This past August, I found myself without a job. Freed of the shackles of the "safe" yet shitty job, it was immediately clear what I needed to do.
I went to PAX Prime and enforced things.
Then, I came home, and declared myself a freelancer on the internets, determined to not work on anything remotely related to SharePoint. Some lowball offers came in, an avalanche of BS lowball crap offers came in, and then I was finally able to find a contract worth taking. On October 7th, I got back to work.
Now I'm back working in ASP.Net code — this time MVC — though really the server-side code is paper thin; it's 80% JavaScript for me these days. The really exciting bit is that I'm able to make the leap I've been talking about for years & years, and really go to work for myself. This past weekend, the incorporation paperwork was filed, and come January 1, 2014, I'll hire myself, and god willing, never look back.