Merry Christmas and happy holidays!!
I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season! For my task: I joined Elitepvpers around Christmas of 2009 to learn how to run a private server for Conquer Online. While I did get into lots of trouble back then, I met a lot of amazing people who helped mentor and motivate me here: @
(who exposed me to network programming terminology), @
(who taught me about packets and let me work with him), @
(who taught me about maps and sockets, and let me work with him as well), @
(who taught me about cryptography), @
(who I got along with the best and mentored me for years), and many others.
During my time here, I got motivated to learn programming from Conquer private servers and eventually took myself to college for Computer Science (completed my B.S. in 2017). I used my education and projects in Conquer Online to land interviews in the game industry: taking a job at Blizzard Entertainment for Battlenet's game microservices (my dream job for 10+ years). I'm now a former Blizz-employee (in light of compensation and culture issues) and work at another game company that I really enjoy (and can feel confident supporting). It's safe to say that I might've been somewhere completely different without my experience here on epvp!
Today, I do everything I can to give back to the community and encourage others to follow the same path and follow their own dreams. I host Conquer Online's dev wiki, stickied threads on epvp, client downloads / mirrors, and multiple tutorials around the section. I love interacting with the community here, and hope to be around for many more Christmases to come.
With lots of cheer,
Spirited
PS: The Christmas tree in my signature is in the style of Conquer Online. Hehe
PSS: There're 5 little Easter eggs on my profile - See if you can find them all!