Hi! I'm Mike and this is my introduction and first post on hive.

A little about myself... I live in the UK with my wife and 2 children. I work as a software engineer doing JavaScript mainly, but I dabble in a lot of things. I'm very interested in the Rust programming language and like to play with it in my spare time. I have always loved films, gaming and computers and I try to give each some time when I can.

History

Ever since I was about 5 or 6, I was fascinated by computers. I would watch my uncle play computer games for hours. At that time he had an Amstrad CPC 464 and when he got up to go downstairs I jumped on and started to learn to play myself.

Soon enough we had a computer at home (an Amstrad CPC 6128) and I learned BASIC from the manual. I was soon able to write a few little programs, filling the screen with flashing colours.
A few years later we had an Atari STe and many hours of games were played as well as some programming.

It wasn't too long after that we owned our first PC. I played a lot of games on it, some real classics, as well as some really fun LAN party's with friends.

As time went on I went and did a course on C/C++ and Visual Basic as well as playing with x86 assembly at home. It was around this time that I also got into Linux. It was quite different to DOS and Windows, but I quickly found that I enjoyed the freedom and vast range of software you could run on it.

After going to university and then getting a job, I was working in C++ daily. This continued through a few jobs until I moved into a role that required JavaScript. After picking it up it's still the language I'm using mostly at work. ES6 and TypeScript are both vying for some attention as well though.

How did I get here?

Over the past few years, crypto and blockchain have really interested me. The concept of decentralised consensus is amazing and I love hearing about new consensus mechanisms.

It was the recent trend in NFT's and more specifically NFT gaming that led me to Hive.
Splinterlands came up in a search and so I started playing just a few weeks ago.
Soon I was keen to learn a little more about the blockchain that ran the game.

It would be great to learn more about how Hive works and try interfacing with it's APIs. Layer 2 apps on Hive sound like a simple but powerful idea and I'd like to learn more.

I never really came across Steem (maybe i read an article or two, but didn't realise what the system was) and so it was nice to read how Hive rewards it's content creators.

So here I am, making the obligatory intro post. I've managed to power up a small amount of Hive, transfer some to Hive Engine and trade some for a few different game currencies. I've started playing dCity, dCrops and Rising Star as well.
I'm still not quite sure what the etiquette is on upvotes, etc but I'm trying to do the right things.

What would I like to achieve

It would be nice to blog a bit on some of the subjects above, it's not something I've really done before. Although, time is often short and I'm pretty good at procrastinating. I'm enjoying learning about and playing the games here on Hive so documenting some of that might be a good place to start.

Regardless though, I've managed to do this intro and say hello to you all.
Thanks for taking the time to read a little about me.