Coding: Or There and Back Again

Coding and I have been on an incredible journey together. It all started back in the mid-90's, at that point we were just friends, we didn’t fall in love until college, and then I kicked it to the curb. This is the story of the circuitous path coding and I have taken together and how it has changed my life in so many ways.

Let’s start in the mid-90's, I’ll set us down in 1995 because that’s just about as mid as you can get. At this time I was in High School and designing websites at a time when few people thought “The Internet” was going to take off. I can still remember making my first website and uploading it to my slip.net account. There in front of me was an awful looking website, so awful that I knew it should never had seen the light of day. That didn’t matter, because I saw its inner beauty, I appreciated its code.

I guess you can call it love at first site (some pun intended). I can still remember that feeling, it was the moment I realized I could build something myself. I was hooked. Addicted to HTML. Ready to create.

Then I discovered Photoshop. This is the first time I cheated on coding, and it wouldn’t prove to be the last. I loved being artistic and focusing on design and soon I was working for Xaos Tools, an early Photoshop Plugin developer in San Francisco. I didn’t write a line of code at Xaos, I played in Photoshop all day and it was glorious.

Then a friend told me graphic designers don’t make any money. I’ve learned that this shouldn’t matter but the Morgan of the late 90's didn’t know any better.

Then a met a software developer who drove a Ferrari. That did it for me, I was ready to become a programming, screw this fluffy design stuff. And like that, coding and I were back on, heck, we were going steady for five years. I moved to Pennsylvania for coding, majoring in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The deeper I went into the world of coding, the more I loved it. I worked for IBM for two summers, it was my dream job, life was perfect. After four years coding and I decided to take it to the next level, we were in love and we wanted the whole world to know…so I got a Masters Degree.

Then I met a software developer at IBM who was miserable, then another, and then another. My dream world was crushed. That feeling from the mid-90's where I learned I could build anything went away, coding for someone else was boring. I was applying to work at giant software companies and realized that working on Enterprise software, while meeting my goals of “making money” didn’t come close to satisfying my craving for building something. I needed more.

So, after my Masters I went to work as an unpaid intern at Dreamworks in Hollywood. Yes, my friends thought I was crazy, and I think I scared the heck out of my parents. I went from writing code 12-hours a day to reading screenplays, delivering screenplays, and making lots of photocopies. It was a complete 180 and I felt great, I had escaped and coding could never find me here!

After a few months at Dreamworks I found an amazing company, Sonos, who offered me a job in Channel Sales. To be honest I didn’t even know what “Channel Sales” was, I just knew it was on the business-side of an organization which meant I didn’t have to code. It was a music company and I loved music, the creative juices were flowing.

At this point coding and I really weren’t on speaking terms. I was mad at coding for leading me down a path to tedium, and coding was mad at me for abandoning it after all these years. I spent nine years in sales at Sonos, loved every minute of it, and proved I had some very solid business skills beyond programming.

I’ll admit though, sometimes it got weird. I can remember having conversations with developers and see them look at me as a “sales guy”. I wanted to dive-into the code, understand how we did what we did, but I was in sales and I had hustled my heart out to escape coding. So I kept my distance and enjoyed being a “sales guy,” I loved closing deals and was good at it. Nothing felt better than a boardroom full of skeptical people, I loved the challenge.

Then I discovered domain names. A new addiction emerged. I could use my coding skills to once again build websites, but this time, those websites made money. I was a machine and coding and I changed our status from “It’s complicated” to “In a relationship” yet again. I built over 200 websites, made money for myself, felt amazing, and then, as I had done so many times before, told coding to get lost. With income coming in I could hire other people to do the coding.

So I traveled the world. With other people doing the coding, and my day job focused on sales, I traveled the world, leaving coding behind in the US while I closed deals by day and partied like a Rock Star by night. Yes, traveling the world in your 20's is all it’s cracked up to be and I loved every minute of it. I’m sure coding was jealous back at home but I didn’t care, coding and I were through, this is the life…or so I thought.

Then I met the love of my life. Do you know that feeling? If not, don’t rush it, just know that when you know, you’ll know. For years we did different things but we dreamed of someday doing the same thing. We had big dreams, we wanted to start our own company and change the world. Easier said than done. Until…

We took the plunge. In June of last year my wife came up with an amazing idea, a few months later we got funded and in October we quit our day jobs, our dream was right in front of us. The only thing was, we needed our old friend coding more than ever. I tracked coding down and am happy to say she forgave me after all these long years apart. In fact, we fell back in love and now me, coding, and my wife all live together in harmony, spending every day together.

My wife is the CEO of the company but also codes and I can tell you that coding really loves all the attention it is getting. We are one big happy family. I’m a CTO, I code every single day, and spend every single day with my wife, the love of my life. That’s right, coding helped us achieve our dreams, I owe it, big time, even if it did take me a decade or two to figure it out.

Photo Credit: Fem op reis via Compfight cc