ScottBWhat was your biggest influence to make NS? ( and in what direction did you see NS taking at the very start?)
What education path did you follow so you could stay/have a job in the Outdoor/ski industry?
What age did you start skiing?
Cheers!
1. The desire to get people who were into the new twin tip thing talking to each other. That was pretty much as deep as it went.
2. I actually started version 1 of Newschoolers while I was in high school. I was doing an internship at a tech company in Canada called Nortel, and while there, my boss said, “Do you know how to code?” I said no, and he slapped this massive book on my desk (they still had books on paper back then) about the Perl programming language.
Then he somehow convinced a co-worker to sit down with me for two hours and try to teach me. I remember my boss relaying the message that his coworker said, “That guy is either the fastest learner I’ve ever met, or he had no idea what the hell I was talking about for the last two hours.” The latter was true, but I studied that book at every possible moment and figured it out after a couple days.
Once I realized I could make a website using my new Perl skillz, I wrote the first code for Newschoolers in an afternoon and launched the site a couple weeks later. It was flakey, to put it very nicely, but it worked.
Then I went to college. I'm glad I went, but I didn't learn anything at school that directly benefitted my ski industry jobs. I've always just figured things out on my own, for better or worse.
3. Eight.
