My name is Ben Mackin and I have been using computers for as long as I can remember. The first machine I remember using at home was a Macintosh LC, and I have slowly progressed up to my current machine a Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0GHz. I got into coding at a very young age, and was teaching myself with Qbasic in SoftWindows on my Dad's Power Mac 7600. I have always been self taught when it comes to computers, and I have always been the trouble shooter for the family. I have read a few books in the early years (2 C++ books, and one Mac game programming book), but I have always been more of a hands on kind of guy. I wrote a bunch of little programs that didn't do to much in the useful department, but it was a means of getting my feet wet with coding.

My first real team project was working with a group of 5 guys on a project known as Celestium. It was a very ambitions project, that had no hopes of producing any tangible product, but it did me a lot of good learning to work with a team, and get accustomed to some early object oriented programming using C++. The team began to show signs of weakness after a few prototypes were created, and soon after fell apart.

My first formal education in Computer Science came in my senior year of high school at Bellarmine College Prep, with the AP Computer Science class. My formal education continued on at Sacramento State, when I entered the Computer Science program in 2001. It was around this same time I began work on a program known as Cocoa eFax (which later had a name change to FaxCenter do to legal threats from efax.com). The initial goal of the project was to get it good enough for my Mom to use so that she could switch over to Mac OS X. It turned out that faxing was a big item that people wanted, and soon I had surpassed 50,000 downloads, and I was well on my way into my first shareware program.