The moment I turned 15, I got a job as bag boy at a Giant grocery store (and kept that job until college). I spent the summer working and I loved it, especially opening the store by myself at 5AM, feeling needed by the real world for the first time in my life.

That would’ve been a good time to drop out of school :)

I learned manual and CNC machining, machine setup, G-code, and MasterCAM while working the best job in the world besides bricklaying.

I was surrounded by extremely competent professionals, and they were dedicated to training me. I was given a computer and encouraged to write Python scripts and pursue computer programming.

I didn’t do the cheesy cover art, or come up with the idea, or take part in the marketing, but I had a lot of fun writing the book! I haven’t re-read it since the first time, but I’m pretty sure it’s good for what it is ¯\(ツ)/¯

I learned a ton of techniques by research NaNoWriMo. I psyched up to read Twilight, but it was so bad, I couldn’t do it. I knew that whatever I wrote would never be as popular as Twilight, and would never be as terrible.

A vanilla JS single-page-app poker interface based on the classic early 2000s poker rooms that I grew up in.

Built as a client for an app running on the NXT blockchain. It’s a job I got because I was knee-deep into cryptocurrency, especially during the time that I lived in Austin, where I was a developer in an early alt coin group that grew out of the local Bitcoin and Dogecoin meetups.

One project that I remember and wish I still had the code for was a deck designing app for an online trading card game.

I used all of these projects to test things Docker vs Ansible vs machine images, along with other devops experiments. I tested React with various different setups and continued writing plenty of vanilla JS.

These projects were all testing grounds to try out Docker, Ansible, virtual machine images and various devops solutions