About David Turnbull

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Hello there! My name is David Turnbull and this is my blog, Adventures of a Barefoot Geek.

If you’re wondering what a Barefoot Geek is then click here to find out, because this page is focusing on who I am, just in case you care.

How did I get started on the internets?

My dad has been in IT since the 80’s so when I was born in 1990 there was already a computer in the house. I can’t remember the exact model but it was a HP touch screen computer which had basic word processing features (or maybe it was an advanced text editor…) and a couple of games like Chess and eventually Scorched Earth.

Once I hit the age of 2 I begun playing the Sega Master System II, which my sister had received as a birthday present. While dominating Alex Kidd in Miracle World my love of computers and video games developed and over the years as my dad upgraded his computers for work and I got to play around with better software, this magical thing called the internets, and epic games like Age of Empires.

When I was 12 I took a sickie from school and spent the day playing around on my dad’s laptop. I was working on a manuscript at the time, an epic fantasy novel that reached 5000 words before stagnating, and discovered the “Save as a web page” feature in Microsoft Word. This merely converted a .doc file into a .html file, but it sparked my interested in creating websites.

My memory gets a bit fuzzy after this, but to my best recollection I discovered expage.com (now defunct) which allowed users to create basic one page websites complete with flashing graphics and annoying sound effects. Soon after, students from St. Paul’s, the high school I later attended, came to our school and offered HTML lessons during lunch time for whoever was interested. All up it was only about 45-60 minutes of lessons over a 3 week period, but it was a big enough boost to get me started.

I begun delving quite deeply into HTML by building small fan sites for video games and in the process made perhaps the lamest video game site in history using my call-sign at the time, Nerdtron. It may look terrible and be terrible but I learnt a lot about building websites in the process and that people don’t like reviews of games less than 100 words (who’d have thunk it?).

The next 1-2 years saw me hanging out on vgamin.com/forum mostly (unfortunately the forums aren’t very active anymore), continually launching new fan sites and just learning as much as I could.

Once the Nintendo DS launched in 2004 I started up dsaccess.com and begun writing about news etc. I sold a banner ad for ~$14 per month and soon sold the site for $260 USD. I was 14 at the time so this amount seemed huge. This was also the same day I decided to become self employed.

Things get really blurry after this point in time (all muddled in with school) but here’s a quick summary of things that happened:

• Bought domains for < $10 and sold them for > $50 without changing anything. Some of the better domain names I owned included SonyPS3.net, DrawingForums.com, UsingAComputer.com and UsingYourComputer.com.
• Launched a bunch of sites (most of them don’t exist anymore) including zeldagamers.com, smashbrosbrawl.net, tutorialsfornoobs.com (with a friend), mellowbusiness.com and vgaccess.com.
• Became proficient with Photoshop, XHTML and CSS and also gave PHP/MySQL a go, but with less success.

What started me on my current path?

In December of 2007 I listened to this podcast, which is an interview with The 4-Hour Work Week author, Tim Ferriss. I’d heard plenty of buzz about the book on many of the blogs I read at the time but naively thought it’d be weird to learn about business online through a traditional paperback.

After listening to the interview however I was compelled enough to order the book, perhaps the first non-fiction book I was actually excited to read in my free time and certainly my first book about business and personal development. I’m still a huge fan of the book itself (pro tip: it’s not about working 4 hours per week) but its most important asset, to me at least, were the recommended reading sections.

Under the advisement of Ferriss I picked up books like Vagabonding, The Dhammapada, and Walden; Or, Life in the Woods. In conjunction with 4HWW these books shaped who I am today. Sure, I’d planned to be self employed years before any of this happened but I had never imagined the joys of simplicity, the concept of vagabonding or just how so many conventions we follow are just, put simply, bad.

Who am I now?

As of writing this I’m still just some kid who likes to write about stuff. I have dreams of wandering the world, living out of a single backpack, writing as I go and simply exploring. And it’s all within reach.

I spend my days reading and writing, hanging out with friends, listening to music, drawing and playing video games. I’d love if I could wake up tomorrow and have my sites earning enough to sustain my dream lifestyle, but for now I’m just enjoying the process.

And that’s who I am.