How I Got Here

My elementary school had two computers. To save a BASIC program you rewound a cassette tape, hit record, and hoped for the best. The screens were black and green. I thought they were incredible.

A few years later my brother and I had a Saturday routine: box of 5 1/4 floppy discs, the latest computer game magazine, and a table at the public library. We’d take turns typing out the game of the month — line by line from the magazine — then spend the rest of the afternoon hunting down whatever we’d mistyped. Castle Wolfenstein 3D was worth every minute of it. Those afternoons were my first real lessons in debugging, though I wouldn’t have called it that then.

I tried to turn that into something official by taking programming classes at a community college, but the academic format and I were a bad fit. I dropped out and, without much direction, ended up hitchhiking. The last trip landed me in Tucson, broke and sleeping rough, standing in a Red Cross food line. While I was waiting, someone near me said the best thing in life was to lay under a tree all day doing nothing. I still think about that moment. Something in me just refused it — that’s not the life I want. I decided to stop drifting, got a job in a restaurant, and started working my way toward something.

A few years into that, a manager noticed I was good with computers and nudged me to try a career change. I applied around without much luck, then in 1995 walked into a record store on a whim and asked if they were hiring. The clerk mentioned they were trying to build an online catalog to sell T-shirts. On the way home I stopped at a bookstore and picked up a couple of “Teach Yourself HTML” books. I didn’t have a computer at home, so I practiced the markup on a typewriter. Got the job. The store folded a few months later, but by then I’d learned enough to land something else — building computers and setting up LAN networks.

I kept going from there. Help desks, network administration, then web development — years in the Drupal world building and maintaining sites for clients. The part I liked was never really the finished product; it was making the process repeatable. That pulled me toward CI/CD work and eventually infrastructure more broadly: containers, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, the unglamorous work of keeping things running reliably. I gave a couple of conference talks about automating Drupal with Jenkins. Got an AWS certification. Both felt less like milestones and more like confirmation that the typewriter-and-bookstore method still held up.

The self-teaching habit never went away, it just changed what it looked like. These days it’s mostly personal knowledge management — I use Obsidian to organize what I’m learning, and I started contributing to a plugin called Breadcrumbs that helps people map how their notes connect to each other. I eventually became its maintainer. AI has become part of the mix too, though I find myself more interested in how to keep human judgment in the loop than in automating it away. The kaizen thread runs through all of it — not dramatic reinvention, just steady improvement, compounded over time.

Right now I’m in New York City with my partner Jana. We recently lost our dog Abbey — she went from seemingly healthy to gone in three days, and that kind of loss has a way of quietly rearranging what feels important. My faith matters to me, mostly in small daily ways. I’m still reading, still tinkering, still asking what I should be building next. The person who stood in that Tucson food line and decided to stop drifting is still in here, checking in.