1955 was the year my grandfather got an MSEE. His thesis had something to do with COBOL. “Computer Science” wasn’t a field of study yet. My mom was born a few months later. She was the third of four daughters. Mom also had three brothers.
1973 was the year grandpa used a foreign key for the first time. He was running the accounting project for the F16. It might have been the first foreign key in production outside of academia.
1975 was the year I was born.
In 1980 at Christmas my grandpa asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a fireman. He replied that I should study computers. He spoke in a deep voice that resonated through his considerable jowls. He had gravitas as the patriarch of his oversize Catholic family. As a five year old I took him very seriously and started saving my allowance.
In 1984 I used by allowance to buy a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 and started to teach myself BASIC.
BASIC progressed to Pascal during high school, but by that time I was starting to question the wisdom of the whole ordeal. Given the values my mother had raised me with, I was more likely to side with war protesters than defense contractors. I saw how the engineering trades had a way of railroading you into certain types of careers. By this time I was as interested, if not more so, in music, and drawing, and theater, as I was in programming. During my senior year in high school I had become the school expert on desktop publishing and laid out the school’s literary magazine and weekly newspaper in Pagemaker. I was the paper’s photographer. I figured I’d study journalism in college.
In 1993 I started college and I was utterly lost. Most of the j-school students wanted to go into broadcasting, and I just couldn’t hang with the big hair. I signed up for programming classes, but that wasn’t working too well either. Why were we studying FORTRAN in class, when after class I was able to explore the newly minted WWW in the SGI lab. The glories of Mosaic. I switched my major to psychedelics and dropped out soon thereafter.
Between 1994 and 1997 I bounced around various technical jobs (tech support for ISPs mostly) and other odd jobs (temp work, construction jobs) and began wandering my way westward from Missouri to California by way of Colorado.
In 1998 I met the woman I would marry, in an IRC channel related to Lycaeum.org. I was traveling (homeless) and she invited me to visit her Boulder Creek house. We lived there for a couple years before buying another house in Boulder Creek that we lived in for another decade. We must have been just a few miles away from @shellfritsch at the time. Pity we never met, but then, San Lorenzo Valley folks had a way of keeping to themselves. In 1998 I was 23 with few prospects and less resume. My true love was 30 and working for Netscape and appeared to have the world as her oyster. She suggested I level up. Which ended up translating to a series of jobs writing HTML, for Cisco, Adobe, others. Also a rather strange job doing escalation tech support for an IBM tape backup system. A 1999 job for a company called Lutris in Santa Cruz gave me a chance to push the limits of the nascent world of CSS.
The 2001 tech crash was hard on a lot of folks, and we were no exception. We had just recently bought a house and also encountered a need for major structural engineering, so I said yes to every HTML contract I could find. After years of this I eventually grew tired of contracting and in 2005 I landed at Yahoo. What a stroke of luck, I was able to level up on JavaScript with the help of folks like Stephen Souders and Douglas Crockford. But something interesting happened in 2006: I had been making prototypes for use in the usability lab, and I started to observe the sessions. It hit me that I was so much more interested in understanding our users and their needs than I was in fixing one more god damn browser bug. I began my transition into UX.
I’ve been trying to improve the UX of software created by major corporations ever since. While we’re getting pretty good at fixing usability issues, we’re still pretty bad (as an industry) at having a coherent and repeatable process for UI engineering that doesn’t drive everyone involved a little bit crazy day after day. And increasingly I am concerned about the ethics of the industry. I feel I am a conscious contributor to surveillance capitalism. It doesn’t sit well with my conscience. But along the way the house turned into a farm in Watsonville. It feels good to be an active participant in the growth of organic food systems, and to be something of a pioneer in the ways and means of very small microfarming. But I’m eager to wrap up my financial ties to the software industry. Just a couple more years before my stock vests…
And maybe a few years after that I’ll be able to return to programming with an artist’s eye. It was what got me interested in the first place, and it was what sustained me through those early days of Pascal… But it turns out that my youthful intuition that computer science would send me into a certain narrow set of career choices was not entirely off base. I’m glad I kept my interests broad, and I’m looking forward to broadening them further still.
EDIT: I keep thinking about parts of the story I left out. Like the guys across the hall in the freshman dorm who were hacking Linux in 1993. It was tough going back then! I can thank those guys for my interest in IRC. I’d never have made it out to California and I’d never have met my wife without that influence. Other weird parallels: One of my favorite websites in the SGI lab that year was Justin Hall’s links.net. He was better than Yahoo at Yahoo’s game at the time. Through him I learned about the chat room spacebar. Turns out my future wife was a member way back when. We were already bumping into friends of friends a decade and a half before we finally met. The internet makes a big world a whole heck of a lot smaller.
