Cole Shelton

When I interview prospective employees and ask them how they got into computers I would say 90% of people answer (if being honest): Video Games.

It was no different for me. I first got an Atari when I was 5 years old and fell in love with video games. I was introduced to PC games on a neighbors Commodore 64 and spent countless hours playing Wizardy: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. That pretty much sealed the deal for me.

Our neighbors upgraded to PC's, but we couldn't afford one, so my brother and I saved our lawn-mowing money and bought a used Commodore 64. I didn't have the first clue how to program, but I managed to code a few simple ASCII type games, but never got much further than that until 7th grade when I got to program on a TRS-80 (pronounced "Trash 80").

It would be another 3 years before I finally had a real programming course at Stillwater High School programming BASIC on Macs. A second BASIC course and a zero-hour Pascal class followed (fellow InterWorks team members Behfar Jahanshahi and Richard Clapp were also part of the class).

I've never looked back from there, computers have been an integral part of my life ever since and I am passionate about building great software.

On the personal side of life, I'm married to a wonderfully silly woman named Kimberly Lane (Hunt) Shelton. Our son, Vincent, is equally silly (and awesome) and was born in May 2009. We are expecting our next young man in July of 2010. We have three spoiled dogs and recently mourned the passing of two of our furry friends, Rambo (siamese) and Brett (Yorkie).