The scenic route

The kitchen computer

I grew up in the country, where the dump and the yard-sale table were our supply chain. Things came home broken, got opened up on the workbench, and turned into other things. My father was an amazing tinkerer (the kind who looks at a pile of leftover parts and sees a machine in it), and it rubbed off; that workbench taught me more than school ever did, including the rule I still run on: TIAS. Try It And See.

I got my first taste of computers in the primary grades and wanted one with the kind of want that reorganizes a kid's life. There was no money for that, so I built electronics out of scavenged parts in the meantime, and mowed lawns and took every odd job going until I could buy the real thing.

The computer lived in the kitchen. With the whole house awake it was too distracting to actually learn anything, so I'd wait everyone out and learn at night. People ask why I'm still up at 3 a.m.; the honest answer is that the kitchen finally got quiet around eleven, and the habit never left.

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The kitchen finally got quiet around eleven, and the habit never left.

Two semesters and most of a bootcamp

I woke up on New Year's Day when I was twenty-two and told my mother I was moving to Toronto to go to school. The following Monday (January 5th, 1998) I got in my car and drove to the Seneca campus. I didn't actually have anywhere to stay, so the first three nights I slept in the car; then my Aunt Pat took me in until I got my feet under me. I've always just believed that things work out if you take the first step, and that you should never make a decision out of fear: figure out the worst thing that could happen and work back from there.

Computer Information Systems was full, so I enrolled in electronics instead: it had the biggest overlap of courses, and I could switch into programming in second semester. Electronics is also where I met a good friend who went on to shape a huge part of my life. We were both poor as shit with nothing else to do, so we competed at everything there was: best grades, prettiest soldering, cleanest breadboard wiring.

The switch into programming worked, and it was brutal in a way I hadn't planned for. I'd been coding for almost ten years by then, and four more years of "what is a variable" (billed to a student debt I could already feel compounding) was more than I could stomach. I jumped to one of those sketchy eight-month schools (it would probably be a bootcamp these days) and didn't finish that either.

Deathmatch during lectures

What the sketchy school actually gave me was a crew. A handful of us spent class playing Quake II over the LAN and ignoring whatever the instructor was going on about; the lab had the one thing none of us had at home (a room full of matching machines on real ethernet), and we put it to its true purpose.

One of those guys found out I could code in C and wondered if I could write him a program. I stopped playing games and worked to squeeze every nanosecond out of "pulse" (the name of the program): dropped to assembly for the inner loop, unrolled the hot paths, swapped the expensive math for lookup tables, threaded it, the whole deal. It was fast.

Pulse introduced me to a whole other group of friends, and we went on a lot of digital adventures together. But all of that led to the job: one of the Quake guys had an uncle who could get me in somewhere doing email support on the night shift, in an industry my church-lady mother would not approve of (also the only corner of the early internet that reliably made money). That was the actual door. I talked shop with the engineers, picked up Perl and sysadmin work, and moved into coding by sheer brute force and ignorance.

The island years

In early May 2003 my college buddy called. He'd gone off to try being a rock-climbing instructor, come back to Toronto, been my roommate for a while, and was now living in St. Vincent (wherever that was). He wanted to know if I'd move down and start a business with him doing "web stuff". I had just gotten my tax return, and the math said I could live down there for six months, pay the minimums on my credit card, and still afford the flight home. I quit my job and landed in Barbados two weeks later. The six-month plan lasted three years, until we'd each met someone, and I miss that life almost every day; twenty years back in the rat race hasn't dulled it.

The springboard

The business we started down there kept some money coming in after I got home, which bought me time, and then the same buddy called again: he'd just started at a place called Schematic, and there was a seat for me. That job was the springboard for everything since. I've worked on and off with people I met there across several gigs and two decades, and it's why I can honestly say I have never interviewed for a job in twenty-five years. Have a chat with the engineering manager, talk to the CTO, start the next week.

Everything changes again

Now AI is bringing the biggest upheaval the industry has seen, and honestly, I'm fine with it. I've been through the browser wars, Y2K, the dot-com crash, Flash versus Jobs, the years when design patterns were a religion, SOAP versus REST, tabs versus spaces, agile-with-a-capital-A, NoSQL versus everything, and the season every monolith had to apologize for not being microservices. For a self-directed learner this is just the next thing to learn. So much is changing that staying on top of it all is sometimes impossible, and it's fun as hell to try.