Me, Myself, and Mormonism (Pt. 2)

And that was really where it all started. I kept at it, learned more PHP (since I now had the general underpinnings of programming knowledge), and still dabbled in Pascal for fun. My first job was when I was a junior, and worked for a local dry cleaning company writing software for them every day after school for a couple hours. I got a whopping $10/hr to write some custom software that kept track of inventory for them. I learned ASP classic after realizing that syncing up 6 remote stores with VB6 and flat files was a crazy idea. And in learning that, I made my first real professional connections that would later prove invaluable. By far though, my favorite part was hearing the store clerks ask, “HOW old are you again??” when I was setting their stores up with the new software.

Looking back, it was the beginning of the internet generation really. The search engine junkies that we were, knowledge at our fingertips. I guess I can see now why it was so amazing to meet someone largely self taught.

The years flew by. I got my next programming job from a promotion at a local call center, teaching myself .NET/C# overnight and teaching two of my friends and my brother the same so they could pass the test and get into the job with me. One of said friends is still programming today, and my brother squeaked by and flirted enough to become our main UI guy. I still keep in touch with three out of six or seven guys I worked with in that group.

Soon after I became an agnostic, deciding that the spiritual equations of the Pentecostal church of my upbringing weren’t quite right to me. Sadly, I got suckered into Mormonism and was a devout believer for nearly two years, complete with nearly going on a mission and falling hard for a girl in the church. It all abruptly ended when I read about DNA evidence against the book of mormon, and very quickly realized I was deluding myself yet again. Jaded, beaten, and miserable with the choices I’d made, I called my twin brother to give me some backup on the ride home from BYU-Idaho with my then ex-girlfriend and her brother, both unaware of my doubts. The drive was 40 hours long, including one part where we wiped out from the snow piling up on the side of the highway. I was sure I was going to hell, and that the devil was going to cause a wreck so I’d die that night, but luckily my brother kept my head on straight. Looking back, my Dad’s words ring in my ears:

“You can really mess things up if you’re not careful, Son”. Lesson learned.

I moved to Dallas soon after, hooking up with some movers and shakers and rubbing elbows with the right people long enough to land me a job making much, much more than I’d made before. Except that I hated it. And then I learned about Rails, and bee-lined for a job doing it.

My brother landed a job working for a Rails shop first, and hooked me up. They weren’t looking for anyone right then, but I walked in and started coding for them and helped them out during an all-nighter to get my foot in the door.

I later would work there under the creator of DataMapper, switch from Rails to run on edge Merb, and lead a team of freaking amazing developers while pulling all nighters to complete deadlines set by the New York Times Syndicate.

And here I am today, Big Love because of an HBO show, my gnarly scars, and a pretty fun boss. For me, Big Love wraps up some of the most important things in my life:

1. The first time I realized I could create stuff with computers
   (cheesily, there’s a lotta love there)
2. The reminder to never delude myself into ignoring my own rationale
3. My first foray into Ruby and all the camaraderie and learning that resulted

So as much as I moaned about it before, Sam Smoot, thanks for the nickname. Lots of great memories and hopefully more to come under this particular handle.

Me, Myself, and Mormonism (Pt. 1)

The super condensified version:

I used to be Mormon.

Big Love is a TV show about fundamentalist Mormons who practice polygamy.

My previous boss prided himself on being an ass (in a generally fun way), and called me Big Love because of said past.

The climactic version

There were tons of books in the box. Dusty, cracked, old. They smelled great, and of course my hands shot out and grabbed each one, thumbing through each of their pages as if I could actually understand them.

I saw math books, some other unmemorable books, even a scuba book. All of them seemed really interesting to me, simply because I knew they contained knowledge I didn’t have. My Dad must’ve been a genious, I was sure of it, ha. And then I saw it. A box, deeper than the thickness of the average books, containing a video, a single 3 1/4” floppy, and a few 5 1/4” floppies. The front of the box showed some charting things and chess pieces, but on the back of the big box it showed a rendition of “Super Breakout”, and underneath it read “Learn Programming Today with Turbo Pascal!”. I didn’t know what programming was, but I knew that it meant it would somehow let me play a new game on my computer. I raced down the attic ladder and ran into the office.

This was right around 1998, when computers like the one pictured here were totally awesome. Mine was just like that, sans the 3 1/4” drive. I’d just started learning how to get around in DOS, and we even tried out Windows 3.1, so I knew exactly what to do with this. Unfortunately, I don’t remember any of the commands I typed, or I’d share for a good laugh. But needless to say, I somehow got myself into the IDE that was Turbo Pascal.

It’s amazing looking back. Without any instruction, I discovered how to run a sample program. I seriously did not have any idea what this was, but I knew that it was doing something. All I wanted was super breakout! So I kept at it, and saw a string in the program’s source code. “Hello world!” it read. I changed it to read: “Hello Keith!”, and ran it again. And there it was, in all it’s glory.

I could feel my brain explode with possibility. I’d done it… I’d created something my very own, without help from a ‘grownup’, without help from a program. I’d bent this awesome machine to my will, and made it do exactly what I wanted it to. I realized I need to know more. I figured out what Write(“String”) did well enough, but what were these other words? uses, var, and begin/end?

Sadly, I didn’t have the book until months later. The video didn’t help. All it said to do was read the book. Finally, we found it at my Uncle’s house, but even more sadly was the fact that I couldn’t figure out what the book was even saying. My young mind had great difficulty in grasping anything the book was trying to tell me. It would be a couple years before I figured any of that out.

But I stuck with it. AOL was just beginning to come around, and we begged our parents for a new computer that we could get online with. Finally we did, and I used a search engine for the first time to find other people who were into the same things as I was. I created a website using HomeStead, but was disappointed with how little I could do with it. I wanted to make the pages DO things. And then I found out what PHP was, and started poking into scripts. My hacking was just that though… copy/paste with little understanding.

And then I remembered Pascal. Oh Pascal, my first true love. The book unfolded before me now. I had enough bits and pieces to make heads or tails of it, and thus I created my first program: Using the frequencies listed in the back of the book for notes, and deciding that a whole note would last one second, I created a jukebox that played the star spangled banner on the internal speaker of my oldskool computer, since my Dad wouldn’t let me use Pascal on the new one.

“You can really mess things up if you’re not careful, Son”, he wisely said. Story of my life :D

Continue on to Part 2…