It’s not often that a twelve-year-old gets a $3,000 check for work he did. Then again, not every twelve-year-old is seventh-grader Alex Miller of Willow Glen. The University Prep Academy student spent about an hour and a half every day for ten days scanning the web browser Firefox by Mozilla for bugs. He was hoping to win a bounty for discovering a major bug, and he did. It was a flaw in the memory of the running program. When he found it, he says that he was excited. When the check arrived, he says that he was, “really, really, really, really, really happy.”

Apart from teaching himself about computers and scanning programs for bugs and raking in the big bucks for finding them, Alex is a normal preteen. He likes playing guitar and badminton, he is studying Chinese, and he has chores around the house. He also like animals, and donated $100 of his winnings to Unconditional Love Animal Rescue, a nonprofit organization run by a neighbor. He plans to use some of his winnings to buy Christmas presents for his family, and perhaps a new computer—in the case of Alex, it’s more of an investment than a gift for himself.
Read More at the Mercury News.