My name’s Rob Stiles and I live in the Rossendale valley in Lancashire, England. Someone has to.
I first took an interest in programming computers when I was 7 years old on my dad’s Atari 800XL. I always wanted a Commodore 64 but I didn’t get one until they were nearly antiques!
10 PRINT "I WANT A COMMODORE 64" 20 GOTO 10
When I was older I got my hands on an Atari ST but it was my dad’s and I couldn’t use it whenever I wanted. Eventually I got a Commodore Amiga and an Action Replay and that’s where my first hacking began – cheating at games! I used my first PC at secondary school but the teacher didn’t really like us using them too much and would randomly log us out if he thought we were doing anything other than following his exact instructions, which was a bit crap – it certainly hindered my learning. I hated school so much and only just scraped a pass on my Information Technology GCSE.
College was completely different. I loved it. I met good people there, discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and the happy environment was good for me. We started learning Pascal so I bought a book on it. Before I knew it, I seemed to have more knowledge on the subject than my tutors. The second year at college we learned C++, and again, I was always way ahead. I aced college with merits and distinctions in my BTec National Diploma in ITA. That’s where my official education stopped as I needed money and got my first job as a programmer for a dodgy company in Nelson, who had me programming in some horrible 4GL called Sculptor.
Today I still use C++ when I have a choice, but I’m also a competent programmer in C, Objective-C, Pascal, Delphi, Java and many scripting languages such as Lua, Python, PHP, Perl and Javascript. I’ve been self employed for 12 years.
I got married 2 years ago. My wife’s from Coventry and I now live with her and my new step daughter. We also had a baby in March… life is good 
Being sad geeks (and proud), my wife and I met on the Internet in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) called Star Wars Galaxies. Sony Online Entertainment have since butchered the game in to a shadow of its former glory but we have fond memories of it.
We’ve played a lot of World of Warcraft and I’ve written AddOns for it, the most well known being SpamMeNot which is an anti-spam AddOn designed to block and report gold spammers without them troubling players.
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