A Builder From the Beginning
In 1987, in a high school computer lab in Canada, I sat down in front of a Commodore SuperPET — a rare dual-CPU machine with a physical toggle switch on its side that flipped between a 6502, a Motorola 6809, and a programmer's monitor. I didn't fully understand what I was looking at then. I understand it perfectly now.
By that point I'd already been programming for years — a VIC-20 first, then a Commodore 64, then an Amiga where I cut my teeth on AMOS, a BASIC-derived environment that was years ahead of its time. What the classroom gave me wasn't the language. I was past that. It gave me structure, and the first hint that this thing I did for fun might be something I could do for life.
The Shortest Path
I started a university mathematics degree and didn't finish it. The program was fine. It just wasn't where I wanted to spend my days. What I wanted was to build software, and the shortest path to that was a technical college program that put a compiler in front of me instead of a chalkboard. I took it, finished it, and started working.
The Long Way Around
A few years in computer stores, hands on hardware, watching what broke and why. Then development companies, writing software other people had sold. Then, for fifteen years, myself — running my own shop, shipping what clients needed. The last decade as a senior developer on larger systems with longer lifecycles. Different rooms, same trade.
Thirty Years in the North
I moved to Yellowknife, in the Canadian Northwest Territories, and I've been building software there ever since. A lot of it was the kind of work you'd expect — applications people needed to get their jobs done. Some of it wasn't. Systems that ran in public spaces, in the international space. Software that worked unattended, in front of strangers, on hardware that never behaved the way the spec sheet promised.
That last category shaped me more than the rest. When code runs in front of the public, the forgiving abstractions drop away. Networks fail. Power flickers. People press every button at once just to see what happens. You learn to build for the world as it actually is, not the world you'd prefer it to be.