How did I get here? (Part 1)

When I was about 7 years old, my dad sat me down in front of an ugly tan plastic box and said "here, let me show you how this works." It was an Apple II.

My dad was a school teacher, and he had a way of getting you interested in something without being authoritative and without having to turn it into entertainment. That's what made him a good teacher. So when he sat me in front of that computer, he didn't say "look how fun this is" and he didn't force me to learn about it the way other kids were forced to practice the piano. He just said "see if you can figure out how to make this thing show your name on the screen."

By the time I was 8 or 9, I was proficient at BASIC. The summer I was 9, I took a FunEd class to learn to program in Logo. Faster and better computers came and went in our house. I learned and then forgot a series of programming languages and tools (Hypercard, anyone? TrueBasic? Pascal?).

You would think I was headed for a future of computer-programming genius-ness. I though I was too for a while. My relationship with computers was effortless and fun, all the way through high school and into college.

I started school at the University of Texas in the fall of 1993 studying Computer Science. My programming classes were a breeze. The other classes required for a degree in in the School of Engineering were not. At the end of my third semester I still had pretty good grades but I started to realize something was missing.

I got on a bus one day and sat next to a classmate of mine named Scott. Scott looked tired, but he was ecstatic about something. He began to tell me how he had stayed up all night writing a firmware for a printer and that it was working. He didn't do it for an assignment. He did it for fun.

I got off the bus and later that week I changed my major to "undecided." It wasn't that I didn't like programming, I did. But I wasn't ever going to stay up all night writing firmware for fun.

(to be continued in Part 2, here.)