Building My Bridge to the Future
“It has always seemed to me that the most difficult part of building a bridge would be the start.” — Robert Benchley
Thus it begins. Finally! This first blog post has been a long time coming.
It’s been coming certainly since I decided to leave my soul-crushing “career” as an Ineffectual Middle Management Suck Up and follow my bliss by finally getting serious about coding. Deadly, life-depends-on-it, live-it-breathe-it-be-it serious. Note the word “career” in quotes, because even though I excelled over a long period of time it was never really more than a job to me and I would rather live in a van down by the river than have that kind of gig again.
It’s been coming probably since I woke up one day and realized that my first attempt to start a tech career had died an imperceptibly slow death even as I worked blocks from The Garage for the World’s First Tech Start-up surrounded by tech history, but with every promotion I was taken farther and farther away from all the cool tech things that got me started working there in the first place. At the end my title was Strategic Procurement Manager and I still honestly don’t even know what that is.
It’s been coming maybe even since Mr. Shackelford’s 7th grade Intro to Programming class at Pine Valley Intermediate, where I wrote my first code in BASIC (licensed from pre-Windows Microsoft, and almost drove them into receivership before we even knew who Bill Gates and Paul Allen were!) on a Commodore PET 2001- N with a 1MHz processor, 8K of RAM, green screen, and don’t forget the state-of-art cassette tape drive!
Regardless of when exactly the chain of events that led me to finally make this first blog post began, now that I’ve started I don’t think I’m ever going to stop. One of the things that kept me from starting was I never knew where to start because I’ve got a lot to say, not all of it worth hearing, but I think more than a little bit is and I just didn’t know how to start my story.
But ultimately that you start is more important than how you start. I spent more than a day writing a framework to tell my whole story and it went on for pages and pages, I kept adding and rearranging and wordsmithing because I wanted it to be a perfect introduction and at the rate I was going I would be ready to publish in 10 years and it would be so long no one would ever read it. I have that all in the bank and we will get to everything in subsequent posts.
But for now I’m hoping this initial post can serve somewhat as a Minimum Viable Product and get the ball rolling, maybe pique the interest of a few people here and there, and like a single pebble can start an avalanche this humble and rambling post will be the beginning of something enduring and worthwhile and entertaining, like the code I hope to write.
