My first experience with “programming” was hacking curse words into the slogan file of Scorched Earth on my 386. It’s just text files.

I went to college for I don’t know what and signed up for an HTML class to have enough credits to qualify for financial aid. I was hooked as soon as I realized I could make art by typing - abstract, minimal, terrible poetry with letters and words set in different styles. I used the <font> tag and FTP uphill both ways in the snow.

Thau, Taylor, and a great instructor named Ben Chang taught me JavaScript. During my last year of college, I transitioned from (dial-up!) tech support to my company’s consulting firm, programming in classic ASP, followed by ColdFusion, and finally .NET. Sharepoint turned out to be my limit, so I moved on to the LAMP stack and open source. In 2009, I quit my office job and went out on my own, building things in WordPress, Rails, PHP, C#, and of course JavaScript.

Later in 2009, in desperate need of physicality, noise, and mess (read: not coding), without a lick of experience, I somehow managed to land a part-time barista job at Intelligentsia. Improbably, it was learning how to make coffee that led me to the best company I’d ever worked for — Mozilla. Life never happens how you think it will.