Till the age of around 14 I wanted to be a pilot, but at that age I got my very first computer: VIC-20 (the predecessor to the notorious Commodore 64), and suddenly becoming a programmer/developer seemed to be the way to go. Hence in the late summer of 1987 I began my education in Informatics. Beside the various home/game-computers, IBM compatible computers was far too expensive for students to buy. However I was lucky that a short trainee term (with a local computer company) resulted in a chance to join their workshop. In this workshop we were a few local students that was granted access to use their demo-machines at night and during the weekends. It worked both ways since we had a chance to work with the computers and the company could use us for minor programming tasks.
In 1990 I finished my education as EDB-Assistent which was a "broad education" covering most areas of computers, however focused heavily on the development of applications. When comparing to my classmates I felt I was about to conquer the world of informatics. However I soon learned that my education had only "scratched the surface". I didn't "break my neck", but in stead I saw the need to "learn new tricks". I am still very aware of this fact, and I've spend a lot of time trying to keep up with the pace, learning new techniques as they become available.
The first 3 years - after having finished my EDB-Assistent education - was spend working in a small software company. Working in a small company means you have to become a "Jack of all trades" (but hopefully master some of them) and still today I try not to limit my knowledge and work tasks on either network nor development. Hence I am both cable of installing, configurating, administrating servers/networks and develop the applications that run on those computers/networks.
In 1992 I had a chance to move to Luxembourg with by Boss and his family, and the chance to go living (and working) in a foreign country was very interesting. We tried (without much luck) to conquer new areas during that year, and changes in the markets for which we developed software meant that our old customers in Denmark had trouble.
Hence in 1993 I applied for and got a one year contract working for the CES (Comité Économique et Social) - part of the EU - in Bruxelles. This was a fixed 10 month contract, that was later extended with additional 3 months. After which I had to leave, since they were running a "strange 10 month shift" for young European IT people. Actually my last 3 months were spend helping "the new batch" to settle in.
Late 1994 I moved back to Denmark and began looking for job which I found quickly. I had only had this job to a few months when I was contacted from CES that asked me to "come back" since the "last batch" was no good, and they had canceled the idea of running the 10 month scheme. But they could only promise a contract of one year at the time. Also I was happy about the job that I had found as a Network administrator/ Developer, and at that point I had just moved all my stuff back to Denmark, so I decided to stay. I've been back in Denmark since, and I have no plans to move away (it was nice trying to work/live in a foreign country, but it was also nice to "come home again").