I have been a member here since November, but not really had anything to post about until yesterday, so I figured that I should probably introduce myself.
My name is Stephen and I am a software engineer, specializing in the web development/digital services industry. I married my beautiful wife, Sarah, in December 2009. We just had our first child, our beautiful daughter, Elianna, this past October so life is pretty busy.
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I basically grew up on LEGOs with my two brothers. My favorite theme was castle with pirates also interesting me. We didn't have a lot of money so the biggest set we got was I think one of the medium sized falcon castles? Mostly we had falcons, lions, black knights, forestmen, wolfpack. Near the end dragonmasters, royal knights, and then fright knights came in and I started losing interest as school got busier and the castle theme got less original. My favorite group is the wolfpack being that my favorite animal is the wolf.
At the end of college I started working for FIRST, a robotics competition non-profit and especially was involved with FIRST LEGO League (FLL). As a result, I have been a judge (including on a state level) and was the Technical Director of the 2007 FLL World Festival (best of 9200 teams in 45 countries), along with contract work for FLL after I left. As a result of working with FLL, I have had lunch/dinner a couple times with the head of LEGO NA and met many people in the LEGO Education group - along with meeting the owner of LEGO several times, which was really cool. With all you hear about corrupt heads of big companies, it was nice to meet someone who is genuine and just a really nice guy. I even got to tour the offices in Enfield and see the employee-only store. Unfortunately, this was during my dark ages with LEGO and thus I did not buy anything cool for myself.
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I no longer work for FIRST (took a job outside the non-profit realm that could pay better), but still have many connections and am hoping to find time to do more judging, etc in the future. And then I started getting back into LEGO's last year and found this site.
So I probably forgot something, but this is long enough. Let me know if you have any questions and thanks for this wonderful site!
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Thanks so much,
Stephen