From a journalist's desk, to two Amazon warehouses, to coding for the web.

It's been one heck of a personal journey.

Hello, and welcome to my page! My name is Anthony DeFeo. I am a 32-year-old native of Long Island, New York, currently living in Ocala, Florida. I work at an Amazon warehouse in town, known as TPA6-HTP9, in the outbound department.

I have a background in journalism, and I worked for a few newspapers around north and central Florida for about a decade, including The West Volusia Beacon and The Daytona Beach News Journal.

I am currently taking advantage of Amazon's Career Choice benefit to pursue a new career in front-end web development, with the help of Correlation One's software development program.

It all started with a surplus computer from the early '80s.

(with thanks to the Bellmore Union-Free School District)

Ever since I was a child, I have taken an interest in computers and technology. My first "personal" computer was a surplus Apple IIe that my family got from what was my elementary school at the time. The IIe dates back to 1983, and we got the computer in the mid-1990s, so it was pretty old by then! It included a green monochrome CRT screen, two 5.25-inch floppy drives (no hard drive!), and a whopping 128KB - yes, kilobytes - of RAM.

Like many computers of its era, without a disk inserted, the computer booted to a BASIC prompt. BASIC, as its name implies, is an easy-to-learn programming language that was ubiquitous on early home computers of the late 1970s and 1980s, like the Apple II series and the venerable Commodore 64 and VIC-20.

This was my first taste of programming a computer and making it do, line-by-line, what I wanted it to do.

This sparked a lifetime interest in how computers worked and how they could be programmed. If it hadn't been for my early exposure to coding, I don't know if I'd be striving for a career in web development today!