My name is Colin Subler. I am the oldest of three boys in my family. I grew up in a small town named Berne, Indiana. This town of about 4,200 people was named after the capital of Switzerland and was settled by Swiss immigrants in 1852. I lived in a quiet neighborhood and was lucky enough to have quite a few of my friends as neighbors. We would play outside together all day every day as much as we could. This is where I developed my love for sports and appreciation for the outdoors.

In elementary through middle school I participated in 4-H, football, baseball, basketball, and Boy Scouts. At that time I was mostly focused on everything outdoors. 4-H was my first real introduction to science and technology. Later in life when we acquired the land for it, my younger brothers got the chance to show livestock, but I was limited to what I could do within city limits. In the beginning of my 4-H career I participated in model rockets, collection displays, and shooting sports. These projects opened my eyes to what are now my main hobbies.

In high school I still participated in the same three sports, but began pursuing other projects in 4-H. In middle school I had joined the tractor driving competition, but became very successful in it throughout high school. I became more interested in anything with an engine at that point. I had a go-cart and a mini bike with an engine I rebuilt with performance internals. This was when Covid began. My baseball season had just gotten cancelled and I had nothing else to do. A friend and I decided we wanted to start a project and purchased a wrecked 2000 Honda Civic for $400 and got to work. Our plan was to start a TikTok channel and document our progress as we turned this vehicle into an “exocart”. We made progress on the vehicle quickly and our channel ended up becoming relatively large. At one point we had amassed over 250,000 followers and had multiple brand deals. The Civic met a tragic end after we sank it in a pond after the Detroit Lions personally requested that we attempt to turn the car into an amphibious vehicle. After that we purchased a C4 Corvette and a first generation Dodge Dakota. We developed our fabrication and car modification skills further with those cars. One tragic day while the Corvette was parked outside the place my friend works, it got stolen and subsequently totalled. That same year my friend had to go to college, while I was still in high school, so that was the day our channel became stagnant. The end of an era.

After that I became more interested in performance oriented vehicles. I watched a lot of fabrication YouTube channels and really found myself interested in the technology aspect. My family never had a home computer or any gaming console other than the Wii. My parents just had their work laptops and did everything they needed to on there, so when their business was about to recycle their old PC’s I asked if I could have one. They said I could and I immediately tore it apart, I had never seen the inside of a computer before and was extremely curious about how everything worked and what each component did. I then put it all back together with no tutorial and somehow got it right on my first try, that was pretty much when I was hooked. I immediately wanted to upgrade this old Dell Optiplex so I could play games with some of my friends who had also recently gotten into PC gaming. I saved up just enough money to buy a cheap graphics card and 16gb of RAM. When I fired up my game for the first time, and got more than five frames per second, I just felt so accomplished. Ever since then I have had the same computer, albeit it looks completely different now because I have constantly been upgrading pieces on it. The only original part from my first PC is the SATA cable to my hard drive. From there, my love for hardware, and now software has been constantly expanding and I’m sure it always will.

Hello, my name is Colin Subler. I am currently studying Web Programming at Purdue University. I currently work for the world leader in medical wire manufacturing. There I program and develop SCADA systems using Ignition and proprietary programs that I have developed in-house. I have also developed the website for my family’s business, and am currently working on some projects of my own. I want to ultimately be part of something much larger than myself and use my skills in a way that creates a lasting positive effect on others, and create tools that help people be successful.