When I was a kid, my dad ran an excavating business. Utility and pipeline work, some residential foundations. He took jobs on nights and weekends, and I'd ride along in the backhoe cab while he graded empty lots for houses that didn't exist yet.
Around that same time, my mom brought home an Apple computer from the school where she taught. It came with a class in BASIC and a thick workbook. I read the workbook at eight or nine and started teaching myself commands. Simple games. Little programs to do math.
That's the short version of me. A kid who grew up on job sites and taught himself to build software. I never really stopped doing either one.
By high school I was building websites in HTML and applications in C++. At Penn State I wanted computer science, didn't make the entrance cut, and a professor who saw how I thought steered me into mathematics instead. I fell hard for algorithms, data structures, the parallel-computing work. I also took a small-business class from a lawyer who owned a stack of companies. Day one, he held up the textbook and asked who'd bought it. A few hands went up. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I hope you can get your money back.” Then he taught the whole semester in stories from his own businesses. I was hooked.
Here's the thing, though. I had the chops to be a developer, and I knew I didn't want to be one. Back then it took hundreds of lines of code just to put a window and a button on a screen. Slow, tedious, a desk for the rest of your life. What I actually liked was the other part. Walking into a messy operation and seeing the system underneath it.
