Prologue

I'll make this as short as possible

Housekeeping

Before we get started I want to take a minute and introduce my best friend. After reading my first post he kindly lectured me on Christianity, gave me some great ideas and politely suggested that I needed to write a Prologue so that people know where I am coming from, before we get too far into where we are going.

Throughout the life of this blog he will be referred to as Dom. I could say a lot of things about Dom. For now I’ll just say…he’s not a friend…he’s family.

Now, on to a brief warning:

I hate writing. I blame Ms. Anderson from 4th grade. Never once a compliment. It was always “Brian, you must learn how to use commas properly”.

That was it. The first time where I felt like a failure. I was 10 years old.

I thought I could be an astronaut. I wanted to reach for the stars. Smacked down by an angry old battle axe for my utter disregard for the rules of punctuation.

But of course she was correct. I really should learn how to use commas.

On the other hand, perhaps, it, is, proof, that, I'm, me, and, not, AI.

I wonder if Substack will even let me hit Publish without angrily yelling at me like Ms. Anderson. Maybe I'll create an AI Agent Ms. Anderson.

---

Oops, so welcome to my brain. I had a good thread going there and somehow I'm thinking about building an AI Agent of a teacher I haven’t thought about in decades. It probably wasn't Ms. Anderson. Maybe Mrs. Griffin? Doesn't matter.

By now if you haven't flipped back to X and started doom-scrolling, you are wondering why a guy who hates writing…..is starting a Substack.

That is a simple question, but difficult to answer.

Boredom? Therapy? Second Career? A journal that my family can read after I'm gone?

I don't know.

I don't know

One of my favorite phrases. My entire life I felt a need to always know. Always have the correct answer.

I’m finally comfortable not knowing everything.

Some people I interact with don’t know how to respond when I say it. Short conversation.

You asked me. I don’t know. See ya.

It takes self confidence to say those words when someone important to you expects you to have the answer.

So let's start at the beginning.

The Beginning

I had problems right from the beginning. I was born with some really strange colorful moles / growths on my upper left arm.

The Arm

Shortly thereafter I had a skin graft and was put into an almost full body cast as an infant.

I of course have no memory of this. What I do remember is how being different shaped my entire childhood.

I dreaded wearing short sleeve shirts.

I was a shy introvert to begin with. The last thing a shy kid needs is a glaringly obvious physical anomaly for every single kid to notice and comment on.

Every single time the questions went something like this:

How did you get burned? I didn’t.

Why does your arm look funny? I was born like this.

Does it hurt? Only when you ask me questions about it.

Will it ever go away? No.

And then you’d hear the other kids talking about it at recess:

Did you see that scrawny kid with the strange arm?

Maybe somebody burned him.

I’m so glad my arms are normal and not like his.

The point of telling this story is to explain why in general I hate meeting new people and despise social encounters.

My default position most of my life has been to avoid interacting with people that are not in my inner circle.

Other than that, my childhood was great.

Somewhere in the Midwest

My dad bought an Apple 2+ when I was 4. It was the Kickass Bell & Howell black one that pre-dated the Apple 2E:

Man, those were the good old days.

This thing required maintenance. About once a month you’d have to pop the case open and press the memory chips firmly down into their slots because somehow they’d slowly work themselves loose.

Try explaining that maintenance procedure to today’s “Enterprise Datacenter Architects”.

At the time I was just ecstatic that I could play pong and lemonade stand. I had no idea that it would shape my entire life.

At the time I was the only kid in the entire area that had a home computer.

Try explaining that to Gen Z. It makes their brains melt. No internet, no Wifi, no Steam, no hard drives, etc.

My First Line of Code

So the reason my dad bought this computer is he was starting his own business that required some computational power. I know…it’s hilarious.

This beautiful machine had an 8-bit 1.023Mhz processor.

Which was just enough to let you write programs in Apple Basic.

My grandfather also bought something similar. He wrote a program called “Budget Master” to help school districts calculate their budgets.

One night we were over at my grandparents house, and Grandpa was frustrated because he couldn’t figure out a problem with his program. My Dad and Grandpa were staring at this program trying to figure it out.

I wandered into the room and begin staring at the screen with “code” listening to them discuss the problem.

After a few minutes I asked “Grandpa, are you missing a ‘$’ on line 125?”

Grandpa looked at Dad with this look on his face like…what does this kid know about programming? Well…nothing really. But I could see the pattern.

This section of his program had a bunch of statements that spit out text to the end user asking them questions, and was attempting to store the responses in variables.

So the code for each question should look the same except for the text of the question and the variable name.

Question #4 was missing a ‘$’ that all the other variable references had. I didn’t know what a variable was. But I knew it needed a ‘$’.

Little did I know that my entire career would be largely based on this ability to fix broken things.

I promise we aren’t going to go year by year through my entire life, so let’s pick up the pace.

Early Childhood

I did a bunch of cool things as a kid.

For example, “Turbo Pascal Camp" at KU when I was in middle school where I got to live in cockroach infested Oliver Hall.

I got to write a black jack program in Pascal.

Or my medal winning performance on stage where I got 5th place in the county spelling bee. I still hate the word ‘spatula’ to this day.

I still maintain that my answer of ‘spatchula’ is how the word should have been spelled in the first place.

None of it is really relevant to where we are headed, so I’m going to focus on the things that shaped me as a person that led me to starting this Substack.

I continued learning to code on my own. All I wanted was better hardware, better screens, better tools and books to help me teach myself what I wanted to know.

Ironically I’m the same way today. Just ask my wife about the ridiculous amount of computers, laptops, 3D printers, CNC machines, etc. that are cluttering our house and garage.

Teenage years

As you might expect, a scrawny shy computer nerd going to a rural high school in the Midwest, struggled in ways you absolutely would predict.

Obviously I wanted a girlfriend but was scared of them. I remember it kind of like this:

I might talk more about this in the future, but for now I’ll just mention that I continued to be a strange kid.

I took up windsurfing on our local lake because my uncle was a windsurfer. I sucked but it was fun. And it let me drive my kickass Camaro to the beach with my mullet flapping in the wind.

College

I started at the University of Kansas as a Computer Science major.

Unfortunately it didn’t go well.

Nobody told me that to be a computer science major you apparently needed advanced math and physics skills.

I’m well aware of my limits, and they were brutally shown to me by the horrible physics instructor I had.

A year later I read Michael Crichton’s book named “Disclosure”. One of the characters in this book was a product manager.

I didn’t know what that was at the time. But I ended up acting as one for about 20 years.

This book opened my eyes to where I could take my life.

You’d think college would have done that, but I was the kid in the back row trying not to get called on and never asking questions.

What if the professor asked me about my arm? I was an “adult” and my strategy of avoiding people was still in full force.

I then became a business major with a concentration in Computer Science, reasoning that the business skills were needed for the company I wanted to start. After all, I taught myself to code…why did I need a Compsci degree?

Career

My first programming job out of college sucked. I’m grateful for it, but it seriously sucked.

I learned a ton. It really helped me with my social skills too.

I had a crush on one of the product managers. I’m not saying I added bugs to my code as an excuse to talk to her…but I might have.

This is where I began to understand there are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.

First Coding Job

I was hired to write code in “K&R C” (a version of C that dropped out of fashion for a reason).

My job was to program Point of Sale Credit Card terminals with custom software that calculated fuel prices for aviation.

The processor in these things sucked. You had 2 choices. Assembly language or K&R C.

So you’d write a bunch of code in C and compile it. Once it compiled you needed to test it. There were no emulators and no debugging tools.

So every single day I’d spend a couple hours writing code. Then the rest of the day was debugging.

The general process involved downloading your compiled code over the world’s slowest modem from your PC to your POS. And it truly was a POS.

Then you tested the code by simulating purchases.

So yeah…I had to have 2 analog phone lines in my cubicle just to debug my code.

Every time you found a bug you had to change the code, compile, and start the phone download process all over again.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the processor in this machine was 8 bit, and couldn’t handle accurate floating point math beyond 2 decimal places.

My first coding assignment was to write a division algo accurate to 4 decimal places.

Seriously.

I had to write code to tell the machine how to do division.

Essentially I was being paid $30k a year to look for missing ‘$’ characters in code that I wrote that could only be tested by downloading the code over a phone line.

I certainly became a better programmer because of the constraints I was operating under.

Today’s noob programmers have no idea how good they have it. But they also didn’t get the chance to learn the way I did.

I made it 9 months before I started interviewing.

DotCom Job

My second job out of college was my dream job. I thought. The year was 1999, smack in the middle of the DotCom hype train.

I joined a company with more money than sense. It was the first time I saw how having the wrong investor, and the wrong management team could destroy you from within. I’ll save the details of this for a separate post.

I also learned relational databases, multiple programming languages, architecture, the value of mentorship, etc.

When I left I did some consulting for awhile and then found myself at another technology startup.

Tech Startup

I was hired by the founders to be essentially their first technical employee, hired to cleanup the mess that a bunch of contractors left behind and build the engineering team.

This one 100% will get its own post.

It is truly amazing how much you can learn working for a complete sociopath.

This is where I met Dom, which matters more than anything else that happened at this job.

Dom quit 10 times in 9 months and left.

I was so burned out, the only thing keeping me there was Dom. So I left and did some consulting for another year while I tried to figure out what was next.

Dom and I ended up working together for the next two decades.

Co-Founder

I co-founded a company with Dom.

We grew it to 100 employees and sold it 6 months before COVID hit.

Timing is everything.

There will be numerous posts reflecting on this, as it truly was an amazing and terrifying experience.

Early Retirement

So, I was fortunate enough to be able to retire at the age of 45 as the result of selling my company.

Although I worked more hours by the age of 45 than most people do by 65.

I’m now 50 years old and for the first time in my life I’m not working on anything other than myself.

Undoubtedly I’ll write more about my past at some point, but I think this is enough for now.

Ironically I mostly handled COVID pretty well. Most of us coder introverts did: