My father worked at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and, being the technical type, taught me BASIC when I was 5 years old. A few years later he brought home our second PC (a blazing-fast Pentium 1 at 133MHz) and handed me my first real hardware challenge: installing a sound card.
When I was 13, I asked him how web pages were made. He showed me I could right-click and view the source. That was it, I was hooked.
I may have gotten caught hacking a time or two, but my dad never found out about the really bad stuff. I was making trojans in Visual Basic, messing with people's computers, and stealing AIM accounts. Glad it was the pre-Patriot Act era!
I started working in IT at 15, and by 16 I had taken over the front-end operations of a computer repair shop, after writing the playbook on how we "tuned up" PCs. I built a custom CD loaded with all the tools we needed, automating their installation and execution through a simple UI. Paired with a paper checklist, we dramatically increased our speed and consistency.
I stayed for a few years before joining EMC (now Dell) to manage multiple server rooms, and it was there that I made the shift to software engineering.
I was drawn to startups and had the privilege of working for some of Boston's best. Buildium was arguably the strongest startup in the city for nearly a decade; their engineering team and culture were unrivaled, and I rose through the ranks from engineer all the way to director.
After leaving Buildium, I joined the newly founded product agency Rocket Insights (now DEPT), where I helped grow the company 20x and expand its reach to the West Coast. I built over 15 products, mostly for Boston-area startups, and fully embraced the TypeScript, Node, and React ecosystems.
I joined Microsoft for a few years, but missed the energy of the startup world, so I went back. Since then, I've been helping startups build from zero and scale their engineering practices, while holding the bar high on code quality and efficiency.
Along the way, I've had a few other highlights worth mentioning. I wrote an engineering book under a pseudonym that hit the number-one bestseller spot for several weeks. I also had the opportunity to go through Y Combinator (YC).
It's been a great ride. I've had the chance to work across a wide range of industries: property tech, agtech, meal delivery, fitness equipment, cloud, risk, payroll, accounting... you name it. And there's still plenty more to do.
And I still keep up with the latest hardware. My home lab runs fault-tolerant private DNS on a Docker Compose cluster, a couple of solid-state NASes, and a few other odds and ends.