Hello, world

This is a picture of me, which proves that I am human, and not a robot. Yep, it is for certain that I am not a robot. I am 99% sure that this is true. Never mind that 1% of uncertainty, life is hard enough as it is, take a load off and just trust me on this one.

About me (a human)

I grew up in central California. San Juan Bautista, to be precise. Hitchcock's Vertigo was shot there, which is pretty cool.

My family descends from the Donner Party, so you better take me seriously if I say that I am hungry.

I tried doing standup comedy once. I honestly have no idea what I said on that stage, but I was told it was funny. I will never do it again.

Discovering the web as a career

In 2010, I moved to San Francisco with dreams of working in the video game industry. After bombing an interview with Double Fine for an IT internship, I started looking around for other "computer things" that I could throw myself into.

Armed with a High School diploma, three years of Computer Science undergraduate work, and my most technical past job being "call center representative", I was off. Failure was not an option.

Naturally, I replied to one of those "seeking rockstar programmer" ads on craigslist. Probably a scam, but I didn't care. I show up, and the guys tell me about their scam. They shit out garbage Facebook quizzes, and it somehow makes them money. I am fascinated.

I take the gig, which pays a $20 daily lunch stipend. Nice.

Turns out the Facebook quizzes/scams were part of the plan to fund a real business venture-- a domain registrar. It was sold to me as "basically I want to say fuck you to GoDaddy" which of course I loved, being a twenty-something with an attitude and something to prove.

I made a DNS server with this weird new thing called NodeJS. I made a Ruby gem to interface with Domain Registry APIs. I typed in "rails new ..." and pushed a bunch of garbage "lol it works now" commits. Profane comments peppered the glorious heaps of my code.

I was in love with this weird internet work. I went to parties. I pretended to know what other smart people said. I gave talks about things I barely understood. I had the room to go ALL IN on this, and I regret absolutely nothing.

The rest of the owl

And so, a career is born.

Badger (the domain registrar) fails in a year, pivoting to BountySource, some idea the founder had in college that he thought was cool too.

BountySource snipes one of the founder's old friends, JG, away from his swank job at New Relic with promises of wealth and grandeur. Company dies a few months after that, so JG takes me with him back to New Relic.

I grew sick of doing garbage ETL work at New Relic instead of the cool product work that the people up in Portland did, so I left to join a little startup called Groove.

I'm loving building everything myself again, and the scrappy startup life, especially now that I had seen it before. I get to "use what I have learned" in a big way for the first time. But alas, one can only build sales software for sales people to sell sales for so long.

I leave Groove to join another tiny startup, Smash.gg, because... I like to play video games? It was PHP, and bad PHP at that (like, no framework bad), but you know what, I had a shit load of fun. It was the first time I stepped away from Rails, which was scary, but that really did codify in me the value of frameworks, and that building your own shitty version of some parts of a framework is a terrible, awful idea.

Smash.gg burns through all of its investment cash and fires a bunch of people, including me. I go back to Groove.

I have the title "Senior Software Engineer" for the first time, which feels nifty. This is about where I start to feel confident in my career. I do some Pretty Good Work. I think I only over-engineered one thing to the point of it becoming a "just don't touch it" thing (THERE'S ONE EVERY SEASON).

Covid happens. Paying $X,XXX a month to live in San Francisco starts to feel really dumb, so my partner and I find a place in Denver, Colorado. I leave Groove, with plans to get a cool new local job when I land in Denver. New place to live, new job to work, new me to continue definitely being a human, yep.

I get to Denver and find a cool company called CirrusMD who offers me a job. Great people, the product isn't evil-- I really liked it! So then, of course, they ran out of money and fired a bunch of people. I wasn't fired, but my whole team was, so, I (reluctantly, this time) submit my resignation. Sigh.

I follow some of the freshly "seeking new opportunities" folk to Brandfolder, which was easy, because their office was literally across the street from CirrusMD's office.

So now we are here

I feel really secure in my work at Brandfolder. I am battle tested. I know when I am correct, and I know when I am incorrect. When I am incorrect, I quickly learn myself back up.

Brandfolder had already been acquired by Smartsheet by the time I joined, but about 1.5 years into my time there, the complete assimilation happened.

But, I was ready for it. My whole whacky career prepared me for the moment.

Suddenly I am building microservices with Go. I am quick to find both the similarities and differences between Go and other languages I had used. It's a beautiful blend of not-too-much code, and not-too-much infrastructure. I think I was only ever paged once for that system, and it was a trivial solve.

Now I am writing Java. I don't like Java, and I know specifically the things that I do not like about Java, but hey, it's just code with a funny accent that you get used to after a few days.