A Technology Life Story

by Julian

The first computer I laid eyes on was my grandfather's.  It was straight out of the early 1980s: suitcase-shaped, off-white, with a black screen and green text.

My grandfather lived in New York City and we went to visit him one Christmas, around 1985, in a then-poor part of Queens, when the World Trade Center was only about ten years old (my memory of it: big, impersonal, and impressive, like a wall built up to the sky).

The computer was a clunky Apple II clone.  My grandfather brought a few of his kids and grandkids (that was me) to his basement to boot it up.  It looked both obviously expensive and cheap at the same time.  When it finished booting - there was a wait - you could see the future in those glowing ASCII lines of text.

From that, my dad got the idea that computers might be good to learn.  He got a clone himself a few years later: an IBM PC clone.  He installed BASIC on it and handed me a big fat reference manual.

He tried to get me interested.  My dad was smart; he had the right idea.  But I wasn't interested.

What I did care about was video games.  And with my Dad's next computer purchase, an Amiga, my love affair began.

The Amiga is still famous for being ahead of its time.  Like the Mac, but before the Mac, it was beloved by artists and designs.  It was groundbreaking.

That was true about the games on the Amiga too: they broke new ground.  There was Another World.  There were Lucas Arts games, all kinds of them.  There were small independent games that came from studios that are historical trivia now, but cut deep then.

Games like Drakkhen, a Scandinavian game, where you scrolled around a desolate landscape with your four-person team before being steamrolled in encounters with huge dragons and bus-sized dog heads.  There was The Third Courier, where you were a Cold War spy roaming the drab, depressing streets of East Berlin (it was under Soviet control at the time).  There was Captain Blood, a European game where you have to decipher the pictographic language of outer space aliens to pilot an organic spaceship.

That's how I first fell in love with computers, through the Amiga.  We had to drive an hour to another city to find computer games, and every time we'd go, I'd pick out one.  Sometimes the hour-long wait to see if the game matched my imagination was the best part of the trip.

Time moved on.  The Amiga was retired.  We got a PC.

I encountered the Internet, or really the proto-Internet, through a BBS in Florida in the early 1990s during the Gulf War.  I left an angry rant about the war at age 14.  I never even checked to see the responses or what happened to it.  I just wrote it and bounced.

I went to college in time for the real Internet, hooked up for the first time to university computer labs in the mid-1990s.  You could go and spend hours every night looking at fancy HTML pages made by randos across the world.  I spent many a midnight looking at websites like suck.com (a pioneering blog) and playing around with the first search engines, like Yahoo!.

I knew I loved this, so I tried to major in computer science.  But I got weeded out.  The computer courses at my university were taught in Haskell and, at the time, I couldn't hack it.  I got a degree in something I never really used, just to get a degree, and entered the working world, where I couldn't find a job.

So I went back to school, this time in a different city and at a less prestigious university.  I tried computers again.  I got further this time, but didn't finish my degree either; this time, I got a science degree, which I did use for one job.

But a man's gotta eat and computers were hotter than the field I had my degree in.

Back then, the state of the art was buying Dreamweaver and using that to make a web page.  I did that and even become the "webmaster" for a running club I belonged to.

I had picked up a little bit of C in those courses that I took after college, so I used that knowledge to get a leg up on learning interpreted languages, like Python and Ruby.  Just the ability to hook up one thing to another and make a cascade of actions happen - that you built, that you owned - that was amazing.

I stumbled upon a library for Perl that let you interact with Amazon's API to pull prices and buy things programmatically.  It was old technology even then - a relic.  When I found it, it had already been abandoned for years.  I got the feeling that whoever had written that library had not seen much profit in it and left.  But I tried using it for a while to interact with the Amazon API to buy and resell textbooks.  I got it to work, but it was a lot of work for very little money.  After a while, I quit.

My big tech break came about a year later.  I was at a party one night and a friend told me a local company was hiring tech support personnel.  I thought, I'll do it.  What did I have to lose?  I was making so little money that the price of one CD per hour was a significant step up from what I earned.  I got the job.

The hours were grueling: 7:00 am to 4:00 pm, Tuesday through Saturday.  But it gave me my foot in the door.

I left that job after one month for another job which had regular hours and paid twice as much.  Within a year, I left that job too - this time for a real tech support job in San Francisco.  Back then, Microsoft dominated and the only way to escape it in the business world was to buy a Mac, which was not popular in my old city, but was (and is) everywhere in San Francisco.

That first year was a brutal crash course in learning startup life.  I sat in a small office with the owner, who's now worth a few hundred million, per the Internet.  There were five of us.  I was restless and I wasn't used to being in a very small, cozy room with only five other people.

After three months, the boss man let me go.  At the time, it stung.

Then my real work began.

I started putting out resumes.  I got another job.  And this time, I understood something important: my position was going to be precarious until I improved my skills.

I loved open-source languages and, while I wasn't a genius, I could learn.  I could get better and I did get better by learning to do useful things.  If you needed a CSV file parsed, I could do that.  If you needed to do some simple math - summing up numbers in a column - or get all the emails in a file, I could do that.  If you needed to put together a book using LaTeX, I could do that.

So I got even better at Ruby and Python.  I wrote lots of scripts which other people found useful.  From there, I did a string of jobs which were okay; they kept me fed and even let me save a little while living as a single man with multiple roommates in San Francisco.

In 2014, I joined a crypto company.  We used to laugh, literally laugh at the possibility of valuations which are seen as normal now.

For my work, I had to get good at the command line.  I was able to send transactions back and forth and even create tokens on my company's blockchain.

But it was a tough environment.  People got fired from there frequently, and my time came when I landed a new manager and didn't meet his expectations.

So, once again, I hustled and got a different support job.  But I wanted out because I wanted to do more programming, more development.  I wanted to have a more important role than I would have in the offers from recruiters that landed in my in-box naturally.  There was a businessman who reached out to me over LinkedIn who was impressed by my time at the crypto company.

He hired me to run his own project and that's how I became an independent consultant and developer.  After that ended - sic transit gloria - I started learning how to buy and sell my own projects.  And with that, my need for regular corporate employment ended.

I think of myself as coming from the "terminal text to VR" generation.  I remember when the first cell phones came; I wasn't prepared for them.  I didn't even see them as computers.  Now I'm recording this largely through my phone's microphone, which is going through Google Meet, which is transcribing all this for me.  I'm using the audio in an edited version to create this text.  We've come a long way.  We've still got a long way to go, for example by incorporating AI, but I believe things can get better, much better, than they are today.

With these digital tools which anyone can use, we can hack society itself.  I used my skills to get work and I tried to make the most of them.  I'll keep trying and learning and doing my best.  And that's all we can really hope for as developers: to make things better for ourselves and for others, one line of code at a time.