My Career Journey ... So Far

The story of how I got into tech is a little unconventional and very personal, but it feels like something I need to share. Maybe it gives someone a spark. Maybe it’s just a solid late night read.

I won’t run through my whole life, but I do need to start where the picture is honest. I came from a lower income family and life was complicated. In 10th grade I dropped out of high school. The next year was a blur, but I got my GED. By 18, my parents had split off in different directions and I was left behind. No car. No money. No direction.

From about that point until I was 22, I lived somewhere between homeless and couch surfing. I worked whatever I could find: fast food, restaurants, factory, construction, anything that would pay me. Sometimes all I could get was part time. Other times I’d land jobs with overtime that pushed into 16 hour days. No matter how hard I tried, I still couldn’t find my footing. There were stretches where everything felt hopeless, but for some reason I kept feeling the urge to push harder. So I did.

Despite everything, I almost always had a laptop.

A beat up ThinkPad held together with duct tape that somebody was throwing away so they gave it to me.If you moved it the wrong way, it would shut off. When I was homeless, I’d sit behind the library at night to use their WiFi, even in the cold dead of winter, and I’d stay there for hours. When I was working 12 hour days and all I wanted was to eat, sleep, and disappear, I’d still turn that laptop on.

I had a mission. Learn computers. Learn systems. Learn networks. Learn programming. It started as curiosity and turned into a real belief that knowledge could change my life. Then everything changed.

I had a best friend through all of this, a girl who never stopped showing up for me. After five years of friendship, we started dating. She let me move in with her and helped me get on my feet. For the first time, I could focus. I could work a steady job and fully commit to learning.

Eventually I caught a break. I was offered a remote software developer job. It didn’t pay more than what I was making at a restaurant, and I’ll be honest, it felt a little sketchy. But my girlfriend told me she’d support me if I took the leap. So I took it.

From there, I took the same survival grind I’d been using just to make it through the week and I pointed it at building a future. I put in more hours than I’d ever care to admit. After work I kept studying. I kept building. I kept connecting with people who knew more than me and learning everything I could. Over time I moved into other companies and roles. I started making the kind of money that let me build a life I used to think only existed for other people.

I’d hear people complain about doing the bare minimum in an eight hour day and I’d laugh to myself because I remember what hard work could really mean. Even as things got stable, I kept doing contract work and solo projects in my free time. Sometimes I’d feel myself getting a little too comfortable in this new life where I was living instead of surviving, and that’s when the old urge would kick back in: keep pushing.

In about a decade I went from a homeless couch surfer with debt and no support to owning a home, having a family, and making my first million. The girlfriend who believed in me, I proposed to her after four years of dating. We got married a year later, and we’ve been married a little over three years now.

When I first started breaking into this industry, I carried some shame about where I came from. I felt like I had to sand off the rough edges and keep my past quiet so I could be taken seriously. Over time that changed. Now when I look back, I don’t feel shame, I feel proud. I didn’t get here with a straight path or a safety net. I got here the hard way, and that means something to me.

If there’s a moral here, I don’t know if it fits into a clean sentence. For me, it’s this. Your past is real, but it doesn’t get the final word. The future is unpredictable, but it’s not untouchable either. You shape it with what you do today, even if all you have is a duct taped laptop and a stubborn refusal to quit.