Lost at the Beginning: 1997-2002

Developing software has become the main way I generate income. I have spent decades and thousands of hours behind a computer monitor. I am deeply grateful that I have discovered this way to express myself creatively and build relationships all while being able to support my financial needs. I spend many hours a week engaged in this activity, but unlike many of my peers, I didn’t connect to this craft early in life.

My earliest programming experiences were when I discovered the programming functionality of my TI-89 graphing calculator. At first, I didn’t know how to write programs in it, though I did know that I could create “programs” that consisted of any kind of text and symbols that I wanted to store for later retrieval. I put this to use by typing out all of the formulas we were supposed to memorize for physics class – it didn’t make sense for me to have to memorize something that I could easily look up were I trying to solve a problem for myself.

However, once I learned how to program, I wrote a little program for summing consecutive numbers. I discovered that the sum of 1 to 36 was 666 ;[ I also learned how to plot random ellipses on the XY coordinate plane! Having a visual output of my tinkerings is very rewarding and is one of the reasons I do enjoy front-end programming.

It didn’t occur to me to turn this into a career, however. At the time I was on the path to convert a childhood love of art into a career. I was hugely inspired by 20th-century sci-fi art and the artist Wayne Douglas Barlowe, in particular. I took every art, photography, and ceramics class my high school offered. I didn’t end up pursuing art, though. In high school I experienced profound depression and feelings of isolation and this contributed to viewing my own work in a negative light. I compared myself to my classmates and was discouraged when my work didn’t get the highest praise. I also noticed that as I got older I stopped working on art projects on my own time. I visited a design program open house and the kind admissions folks couldn’t make out my confusingly-rendered coffeemaker concept.

Even though I abandoned visual art as both a career and form of self-expression, I retained a strong sense of craftsmanship and personal pride in my work. My main art teacher, Mrs. Hogarth, would not let us turn in work that she wouldn’t assign an A+ grade to. Each time you tried to turn it in, if there was something that could be improved, she would point out how to fix it and give you the opportunity to do so. This was challenging for a lot of folks because she would sometimes use humor to point out how something was really not working. Some folks would never take her classes again but others would learn how to take critique and criticism and separate their ego from their work. I think that being able to give and receive constructive criticism are essential skills in my personal and professional collaborations.

I remember a feeling that the end of high school was an abyss’ edge that I was rapidly approaching. I remember listening to ticking mechanical clocks and dreading the feeling of time passing. I had to pick something to dedicate my life to that could sustain me financially and it wasn’t clear what that should be. Struggling to integrate into the social circles of my classmates, I found myself having no peers to influence me. I also felt like I couldn’t share my struggles with parents and teachers so had little opportunity for guidance and mentorship.

I craved a feeling of surrendering to something that would give me guidance and a direction. Knowing that we were in relative peacetime (this was pre-9/11) I decided that I was going to apply to the military and hope to be able to learn something technical like electronics or radar operation. However, a knee injury convinced me that I would not be able to handle basic training.

Eventually, knowing that I could get decent grades and was good at technical things, I came around to the idea of studying computer science. At the time I was not especially inspired by the early internet. However, I was hearing about the lucrative aspects of what was later named the dot-com bubble and I figured that I needed to go into a field where there was some guarantee of making money. In the beginning, for me, it really was about money – I wasn’t passionate about computers like some of my friends were.

My earliest experiences of computers and computer networks were friends telling me about their QBasic programs and playing Trade Wars on bulletin-board systems. They would share with me their experiences of installing Red Hat Linux on their PCs. My earliest personal internet experiences were visiting really terrible table-based websites and not understanding what all they hype was about, playing a black-and-white flash game that let you “kill” the Barney dinosaur in the school library, and having the school librarian help me create my first email account on Yahoo that I used for more than a decade afterward. When my parents finally bought a computer with internet access I vividly remember the feeling that a fifth presence had entered our home. There was now a door in our home that wasn’t there before. My habits changed profoundly from one week to the next. When before I would spend hours creating and planning Dungeouns & Dragons settings and adventures and playing console video games, I would shift to trolling on local network54.com band website message boards and chatting with friends and strangers on Yahoo chat rooms and AOL instant messenger.

My first impulse was to apply to the University of Florida because I heard a handful of classmates talking about going there, but my dad said that he would not be able to help financially. I decided to stay in my hometown and go to community college to start taking pre-requisites for a computer science degree. Here’s where I started my first real programming experiences. I got an A in intro to programming with C++. I found the class very easy and enjoyed my professor’s stories about her experiences programming not with punch cards, but with punched tape. I really appreciated her comments of “Beautiful!!!” on my printed programming code submissions. This idea that there could be an aesthetic beauty to programming was comforting because I came from a world where aesthetics were the function of the work. It was sweet to learn that work could be both purely functional and also beautiful <3

To make money in the summers I worked helping a tile installer. This is where I had another experience that shaped my attitude toward my work. My boss’ name was West Pinion. We worked in un-air-conditioned spaces in the middle of hot central Florida summers mixing messy batches of tile cement, hauling heavy buckets, tearing out gross pet-stained carpets, and kneeling on hard floors all day long. However, he always wore nice, fairly fashionable clothing that was always spotless. We would sponge, mop, and sweep as messes happened, and at the close of every day and would leave every job spotless. He pointed out how other crews wouldn’t do this and remarked how much more satisfying it was to do a job right. This attention to detail reinforced my experiences in high school art classes and has helped me to understand that any kind of work can be satisfying if one brings an attitude of personal pride, care, and attention to it.

Years later, while leafing through the first chapter of the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, I came across an anecdote that echoed this value in me. Steve’s father was into electronics and pointed out to Steve how there are parts of a machine that most people never see. For example, the wiring hidden inside the case. There were two ways one could approach work that the user of a product would never see. You could throw it together quickly and perhaps make the wires too long and laid out in a messy way, or you could trim them to the right lengths and carefully tuck them away so that the internals of the device were just as beautiful as the outside. I see computer code the same way. The maintainers of a project or a product are also users of that product. I want to enter a project that has been thoughtfully and beautifully laid out. This extends to documentation as well as to the way that the project is managed and administered. It is most satisfying to enter a project where the respect and care of the end-user also extends to the maintainers of that project.

My two years in community college went by quickly. During that time I connected with some high school friends that also stayed in town as well as other local musicians and had some very important early musical experiences that shaped my life profoundly. I discovered that music could be a way to express myself in a way that I couldn’t using visual art. I also discovered that music could help me form strong and meaningful friendships that had a high degree of intimacy. One connection in particular, would last for more than 15 years and satisfy a need in me for musical and personal mentorship.

Part 1 of My Software Journey

Part 2: Unsteady Steps: 2002 - 2005