Origin Story

My Software Origin Story

I used to have this spiel I would give when someone would ask about how I got started in software. I have since then just found that story a little self-involved and congratulatory. I do think I came at a time and place (early 2000’s and Seattle area) that was definitely conducive to finding opportunities for myself. But, I won’t say any longer that this was just handed to me. I had to risk a lot and I had to think on my feet quite a bit just to stay afloat.

This recurring theme of thinking on my feet was and is something that waxes and wanes as the years go by. I won’t embellish that fact even though future employers may be reading this. I won’t pretend like so many job candidates that I operate like a machine and perform like an olympic athlete on my daily duties. I sometimes struggle and I have learned that this is not unique to myself. It’s simply appears unique when there is a healthy veil between the consumer and the sausage (think of how the sausage is made). In fact, this admission of struggle and imperfection should serve as a good filtering mechanism. If a future boss reads this and is deterred from working with me, then I thank you for your time and genuinely wish you the best of luck. However, I think the feeling is mutual.

Much of my writing, on my personal website that is, definitely pulls the veil aside and shows a bit more of what goes on with the software developer, the software tester, the product manager. All these players in fact do have interesting interactions and have human struggles that do affect their work and does affect the product.

I would hope that what I write serves to encourage those that feel like they don’t know enough and quite frankly hold themselves back in so many ways. For this reason, I will write on my origin story a bit. More to give you a taste of what the industry was like in 2001. But also just to reinforce the power of just getting up more times than you fall down.

My story really starts in a series of restaurants. This is where I started my early career. From the age of 12 (to roughly 22) in Baltimore and Seattle, I worked in restaurants. It was a natural fit as I fell in love with food not long before that and needed the money to get by. I’m sure I’ll dive into this in future posts, but I had instilled in me at a pretty young age a working class ethic. One that still serves me to this day. Growing up in the 90’s and in places like Baltimore, having a job was not an experiment in having some kind of adult-like responsibilities. It was an absolute necessity. Not one that either of my parents told me I must do. But, one that I learned I must do if I wanted to wear different clothes other than hand-me-downs or buy things like books or a wok to fuel my new obsession with cooking.

There are many valuable lessons to glean from my early career, but I will leave those for a thematic unraveling later on. For now, the point is, I didn’t really know much about computers when I found myself at the age of 22 with a 1 year old son and the pressing need to provide. My wife at the time worked and knew somebody through somebody that could get me a job working on a video game at Microsoft. This was a crucial gift that not everybody gets. And I didn’t execute perfectly. I stayed at home with my son during the day and worked the night shift being a video game admin that could get characters unstuck from the landscape (my first encounter with bugs). I would get off at 7 am, drive home incredibly sleepy and watch my son all day while my wife worked. I could nap when my son napped. But, otherwise, we went for walks, watched PBS kids shows (I still love Pingu; it’s so calming). Sometimes I managed to cook dinner. But, I would once my wife got home, I would drive to a community college to take my software testing course before doing my night shift once more. I did this for roughly 5 months and I would sleep in the parking lot during this software testing class when we had breaks. But, it was that drive that kept me going. I probably physically aged quite a bit during this time, but that investment was what taught me so much about software and gave me my first access to a programming language (Visual Basic 6).

These were seeds I planted early on. Yes, I had a lot of doubt when I was so incredibly tired from lack of sleep. But, there is no force greater than a parent’s love for his or her child. I don’t think my wife wanted to do that work that she did, but honestly, we both somehow dug in and created a pretty steady upbringing for my boys. Years later, I would go to interviews just for practice. Interviews for jobs that I had no business getting. One of them was for a junior developer role writing test automation in Visual Basic .NET (which was brand new back then). They shockingly offered me a job. During the interview, I was brutally honest about my lack of skills, but sometimes you just need to get in front of the right person and show them how hungry you are. I could easily have declined saying that I was just doing this interview for practice, but then I felt pretty bad about telling them I was just wasting their time. So, I had to accept. After the first day on the job, I realized just how much I didn’t know.

This was probably the first time I panicked about being found as an imposter. This being quite the overarching theme in my career is the jerk to be thankful to. Most people I really relate to nowadays at work freely admit to this imposter syndrome that keeps you up at night. But, at the time, I was scared white about being found out and these people are going to fire me and ask for my money back. I had turned down a contract extension for my testing job at Microsoft just so that I could take this junior developer role. So, there was all this fear of embarrassment and failure that I just had to eat over and over again. Stuffing things deep down inside you often means eating meals that are often quite unpalatable and make you retch, but is the meal that gets you by. After that first day on the job, I bought a programming book at the local book store. These books were like 50 bucks and had some CD/DVD in the back for the starter code, you know in case you have a computer at home. I barely had a working computer at home. But, I read this book every day on my bus ride to work. Just hoping that they would not catch on that I was just a dishwasher/line-cook from Baltimore that used to get in trouble for the dumbest things.

This fear and the absolute necessity of it was the thing that I end up being immensely thankful for. It was always in my back pocket. But this is really my origin story. I wasn't bitten by any radioactive spiders, but I was bitten by love, and that's really what it's all about.