Sam Stone

Ever since I was little, I’ve always loved creating things, either through drawing, sewing, playing pretend on the playground, or building cardboard forts with my friends. In middle school, I was hooked on making art and drew piles and piles of illustrations. From then on, I was convinced I wanted to make art my full-time career when I grew up. Throughout high school, I continued to study art and built my portfolio in preparation for going to art school. During my senior year, I decided to take a game design program at my local community college to prepare for the video game concept art courses I planned to take in college.

I begrudgingly signed up for an Intro to Game Programming course since it was required to be taken alongside the Game Design course. As I got deeper into learning C#, I realized that programming was similar to making art. I enjoyed the creativity in coming up with different solutions to the same problem, the challenge of being faced with new bugs, and seeing how my hard work directly translated into a polished product. I thought that I would never find something that I would enjoy outside of art, but this course proved me wrong.

Within a few weeks before applying for colleges, I decided to scrap the idea of art school and changed my major to computer science. Throughout studying computer science at NC State University, my passion for programming and software development only grew. I loved helping my friends debug their homework and working on teams to create web applications for class. It was always satisfying to see everything come together to create something awesome. 

During my senior year of college, I started taking art commissions as something to do in my spare time. I discovered how happy it made me to collaborate with clients on a product and to see their reactions when they loved the result. When I joined Atomic Object's Accelerator program, I was excited to work with clients in a similar way. I look forward to diving headfirst into learning as much as I can about software development and consulting.

Outside of work, I like to sew, draw, scrapbook, hang out with my pet lizard, and play video games.