The Industry Decided to Harvest Users. I Decided to Build for Myself.
I started writing code in 1981 on a Commodore VIC-20. I was 11 years old.
Not because I had a plan, not because I saw a career path, I was only 11 after all, but because computers were the most interesting thing I’d ever encountered. I couldn’t stop thinking about them and the endless possibilities that they represented. By the time I was 14 I was writing BBS software and had landed my first paid programming job through the early online community. This was before the internet as most people know it existed. Before the web. Before email was something normal people had. Just modems, phone lines, and a community of people who thought computers were worth staying up until 3am for.
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