How Code Changed My Life
part 1: with my family on long island
the easiest step of those ten is step 4. 10k post about my life's journey to this point, and how this code changed my life, not a problem. let's start at the beginning, with my parents.
Elizabeth F Stone and Robert A Smith, two people from backgrounds so different on the outside, yet so similar in their values.
Elizabeth started life with a problem, the same one she started me off with, it's called super cali fragilistic expiala cleido cranial dysostosis. it's the same problem the big head kid in the stranger things netflix show has. the symptoms at birth are bone deformities in the cranium that result in the delay of the soft-spot closing. for her, it caused, as it often does for us who have the problem, hearing loss. she's basically been useless to talk to when standing on the left side of her for as long as i've spoken to her. as in, since her childhood and for all of mine, she has required a hearing aid as a result of the genetic abnormalities she was born with. fine enough for her, she had a mother of a nurse, her mother, advocating for her from day one. she may have been put in special ed classes if the public schools of syracuse were left to their own devices, yet, her mother ensured her placement in regular classes given her regular cognitive ability. by the time i got to know her, that regular cognitive ability had been enhanced by a life-long love of learning, reading, and overcoming social obstacles.
Robert A Smith started off life a with a problem, his parents were criminally protective of their children and sometimes full-blown criminals in the eyes of the nassau county court system. by the time he was a teenager he had paid his fathers bail. the crime? the man undercut general electric's prices on home appliances, against their distribution agreement. his parents were keen on getting by in society with the ability to go to bed at night assured of their own character, regardless of the reputation given to them by the world. for Robert, with his cognitive ability being somewhere above average, born to a life of close-knit family bonds that extended into the business world, his young adulthood, starting before his college graduation, was an adventure of entrepreneurship.
from my mother's actual effort to towards being educated and my father's clumsy knack for being intelligent, i was set up with parents that valued brains. there's another person in this story, a girl who grew up with me, about a year and a half older than me, named Schuyler Stone Smith. she is my sister. with her. older sister syndrome her values also became meaningful, whereas my parents valued academic and practical signs of brain activity like reading and mental arithmetic, she valued not looking like a chump who was good at math and bad at having fun. her childhood had some school grades in it, all passing, only, hers also had sports and getting grounded for sneaking into manhattan beyond mine. i was never grounded, though my indulgences were more consequential.
brains was the shared value that bonded Elizabeth and Robert, from what i could tell. they divided at social lines, where she was eminently concerned with the way she saw herself in the broad world he was eminently concerned with the way he saw himself in family matters. they divided at labor lines, where she took more a more wasp-y approach to a career he was more immigrant-bootstrap-y. they divided on leisure, she would enjoy entertainment like broadway plays and he would value fun like boat races. they did share more values than brains, like honesty, like frugality, like sentimental attachment to objects. only, now, here, reflecting on how this advent of code challenge changed my life, it was their value of brains that seem to be what it was all about for me all along.
part 2: with Dan S Vernam at iD tech camp
childhood friends form the foundations of a social personality. there were many along the way, yet only one who shared the experience of computer camp with me. he is Dan S Vernam, a good man with a career in music events that is surrounded by technology.
when we were in high school our parents arranged it that so we both would leave our regular summer camp traditions, which were typical go-outside-to-learn-about-the-world affairs, in favor of a summer camp hosted at a college campus in connecticut and put on by internalDrive, which exists today as iD tech camps. it was here that we spent two weeks mostly indoors getting our hands on software development tools used for building digital creations. the first week was websites in dreamweaver. while i remember it well, its not worth mentioning beyond the fact that it happened and it was good. the second week was 3D games in some tool whose name i do not recall, yet, this was the week Dan and i teamed up to build a project together. the setting was a kitchen and the main character, controlled by the player, was a can of campbell's soup. this soup-can hero was able to navigate around the kitchen and interact with the toaster and other appliances. i do not think about it so often, yet, this was, in fact, my first software project that was truly a collaboration, and would stay that way till i graduated college. we were both creatively engaged with the project with the enthusiasm of founders, yet, we were not capable of executing the vision and by the end of the week we had an unplayable game. it did run, which seemed like an accomplishment.
this camp had all sorts of kids, some who were clearly in camps like these each and every summer, who excelled at computers. for a sense of the time, there was a boy at the camp bragging that he had access to the gmail beta. at the time, gmail was only accessible by invite and each invited user received less than 10 invites. he was exuberant that he could game the system by inviting other emails in his control to then have each of them receive invites, making his access unlimited. yet, he did not give a single invite to me or Dan. at the time, as glad as we were for the time on the computers, we were equally glad that we got an afternoon in the sun to play ultimate frisbee, our favorite pick-up sport. each team was led by a counselor and we were floored by how good the college-aged counselors were, giving us hope about how good we might be by their age. even if we could not articulate it, Dan and i were realizing that we would need to start practicing fewer skills in a more concentrated way as we grew up. neither of us would go on to get all that much better at ultimate frisbee, yet, we both went on to practice software skills in the years to that came after this camp. him in the music domain, me in the engineering domain.
part 3: with twenty-four students at school
in school, how you get the grade matters as much as what grade you get. given my father's haphazard above average intelligence and influenced my mother's concentrated efforts in school, i was a student who was in the above average classes receiving good grades without so much effort as many other students. by the time i was a junior in high school i was not at the upper-most tier of students, those who were exclusively attended the advanced placement or college-credit classes whereas i was in some of those classes as well as the regular education classes with students a grade above me. if i had better at-home habits i would have been in that top-tier, yet, i spent more time pressing buttons on the computer than pressing forward in my homework. there were a few instances where my computer skills paid off immediately in school and other times where the costs involved would not prove valuable until years later. three highlight experiences are the time the advanced placement world history teacher gave her class an at-home test, the time i discovered high yield investment programs, and during the years my school used orange sadlier-oxford vocabulary books for english classes.
firstly, the at-home test. for reasons lost to time, our class of twenty five students was to take a test that was planned to be administered in-class at our homes. it was a multiple choice exam with fifty questions in a printed packet along with a blank scantron answer card for us to fill in our choices. one student received a perfect score and the all of the other twenty four students received a near perfect score, each missing only answer. our results were the result of microsoft excel and aol instant messenger. i put the name of each student in a column and the number of each question in a row. using the messenger i cobbled together answers from the best in the class then put together a final set of fifty answers that reflected the answers with the most agreement among the best students. when the scantrons were run twenty four of us has not only identical grades, we all got the same answer wrong. in the classroom, the teacher indicated she would never being giving us another take-home test, yet, she had no consequences for us. we all did really well that one time. it was the result of digital collaboration, primitive methods of using the wisdom of the crowd, and a willingness to share information. the pay-off for me was the near-perfect grade that would be included in my final scores. more than that, it was an opportunity to use the computer to be a valuable member of society.
second, high yield investment programs. these were ponzi schemes operated on the web. they all had a hook and the most memorable to me, the one i lost the most money on, the one whose founder Charis Johnson is in wikipedia today, was called 12dailypro. after depositing a sum of money you would receive 12% back every day for 12 days. the return on a deposit of 100 US$ was 144 US$. for a depositor it was necessary to view 12 ads each day, the premise being that the revenue from viewing ads combined with returns from deposits invested in gold and other commodities was substantial enough to sustain these remarkable payouts. i had a curiosity about 12dailypro and sites like it because my father educated me on investing in the stock market, giving me rights to invest his money in exchange for the obligation of taking lessons from him to understand weighted moving averages and other tools for historical price analysis. it was technically challenging to get money in and out of these programs, especially with my status as a teenager, yet, i viewed it as a worthy after-school activity. because the mechanic of the website required depositors to view 12 ads each day i took on the task of building a macro that would do this step for me. it is the first attempt at automating a computer task that i can remember making. i used a tool that allowed me to point and click on my screen, which would then record the actions i took into a basic repeatable script that i could then edit and refine with a user interface. my involvement in the ponzi schemes of that era led to immediate financial failure and immediate technical success. in recent years, those early financial failures provided me good discernment in the face of crypto-currency bullshit that operates under similar premises as high yield investment programs.
i did not have guidance on a career when i was getting into 12dailypro. i only the influence of my father being a small-businessman and my mother being a college-graduate to guide me towards getting a bachelor's degree then starting a business. at the time i figured i would do something in the financial space because i like the moving averages and the math and the money.
finally, vocabulary books. the long-and-short of it, i hosted websites with the answers and displayed google adsense advertisements next to the answers to earn thousands of dollars. one day, not wanting to do my homework, i searched for the answers online and found them. the website had a white background, blue underlined links to each chapter in the vocabulary book, and html tables to organize the answers. when i went back to it the next time i needed answers, it was gone. i searched again and found the same site under a different domain. this time i downloaded and saved each page to my computer, fearing this one would disappear as well. when it did i took the opportunity to host the site myself. i had a few other experiences with making websites at this point in my life, yet, this one is the first that i remember sharing with others. i told all my friends about it, they used it, we all did well on our vocabulary homework whether we put in the effort to learn new words or not. sometime between first hosting it and graduating high school i learned to publish ads with a google adsense account. i told all my friends to click those ads. they did. i earned money. beyond that, after connecting to google adsense my site became a high-ranking result in google search pages and students across the country visited, which earned me more money. while my career in software has earned me a fine sum of money from selling my time, never since then has a single website i operated succeeded in the way this one did.
my favorite lyricist of all time, Michael "eyedea" Larsen, ends a verse with, "oh and i almost forgot, i got a really good memory." in most cases, i earned my grades by sitting in class while simultaneously being awake and that was it. in combination with my really good memory, hearing the teacher and nominally interacting with the material gave me enough knowledge to work with to pass tests with high scores. my overall grades were usually reduced because i often neglected homework entirely. instead, at home, i was on messenger, playing games, and surfing the web.
in school, how you get the grade matters as much as what grade you get. part of my grade regularly came from using computers to get answers instead of studying the provided books. often i was academically shortcutting, cheating, and skimping. no doubt about it, if i could do it all over again i would do it the same. over the course of time i shored up my work ethic out of necessity and by opening my eyes to the superior results others achieved merely by applying themselves to their life's tasks, assignments, and challenges.
today i build software by identifying places that are subject to automation, by working with the best people i can find, by taking risks with my own money, just like i did in those scenarios that now date back more than 15 years ago. in those 15 years i developed the work ethic to compliment my natural skills, which has resulted in all of my greatest career achievements. many of those years were dark and full of terrors, especially those at boston university.
part 4: with Mary Lee in brookline
my haphazard methods for earning grades were sufficient enough to land me in a bachelor's degree program at boston university, a school that everyone i knew at the time considered to be a fine institution. as in, no one accused me of slacking off, no one accused me of failing to meet expectations, no one did anything but congratulate me.
at this point, most of my computer life was isolated from my social life. none of my friends from high school pursued software engineering, computer science, or anything similar. i did not recognize it as worth pursuing and instead i started school in the pursuit of a business major. where back on long island i had minimal supervision that kept me from becoming a delinquent, i had no supervision at all in boston. my freshman year, except for scheduled class times, i was usually on the campus of berklee school of music hanging out with musicians. my father's business was in the music industry, my childhood friends all played instruments, and i was always a fan of listening to music in every genre. i could not play any instruments, yet, i found myself at home with the artists from berklee. this did little for my social life in school. i went to class, listened, got passing grades, went to my dorm for a nap, and otherwise walked a few blocks to berklee's campus to be the audience for the perpetual jams my musician friends were putting on.
i did not come money, i was there on a combination of merit-based and need-based scholarships, and my parents only put up the money for books. to keep myself going i took on odd-jobs. boston unversity hosted a job board where many bostonians would pay well to have their yards raked, furniture moved, and even their printers fixed. by pay well i only mean these jobs paid better than the regular campus employers like the bookstores and the coffee shops. so i busted my ass all over the city for years so that i could attend concerts, afford drugs and alcohol, and participate in the culture of area. i once got a job as the business and personal assistant to the chief executive officer of a fledging paper goods manufacturer. it was the only job where my academic studies in the business were applicable to the work i was doing out of it. we got on great, me Len Sugarman of brookline would sit at desks for hours on end reviewing financial documents, business proposals, machine specifications, paper freight shipping costs, comparative advantages to building a factory in arkansas versus california. we would labor over language, revisiting the same paragraph in a proposal multiple days in a week, referencing thesauruses to make sure we explored all of our linguistic options then cross-check a dictionary to be sure we used our chosen option correctly. looking back on it, i believe that education was better than getting an mba from harvard, which he would regularly claim any time i seemed to be losing enthusiasm.
for all the entertainment i got from the musician's performances, the passing grades in the classroom, and the practical education in the office, none of these activities brought joy with them. with the geographic disconnect from my long island-based family combined with the social disjointedness of my activities, i was feeling i had gone to a place where i hoped be with all the world and instead found myself entirely alone. miserable. dark. full of terrors. that summarizes my mental and physical state all my years in college. i graduated with only three and a half years of classes, made by possible by some college-credits earned in high school. my degree is a bachelor of business administration with a concentration in entrepreneurship. while the credits were earned with three and a half years of classes those classes took five years to complete because i had three health-related withdrawals. there were weeks i did not leave my dorm or apartment and stretches lasting for days when i did not leave my bed except to use the bathroom and eat. i was not about much, just laying still, usually keeping entertained with a book or movie or game or similar. my roommates would be concerned, usually i did not respond. the best way i describe my health is to say i was empty. empty of nutrition as a result of poor diet, empty of strength as a result of poor exercise habits, empty financially as a result of earning too little to fully function in boston, empty of joy as a result of sharing too few passions with friends, empty of love as a result of being so far from family.
on my way to my degree i diverged temporarily from the business school into the college of arts and science for an attempt at earning a degree in computer science. the attempt failed, though i earned 20 credits, because of all the emptiness of my life. i felt drawn to the education, yet, with it's increasingly complex theoretical courses involving dense, dense, dense arithmetic, i was approaching failing grades. when i arrived back in the business school, during my final calendar year in boston, one of my odd jobs transformed my future. i was fixing an artist's printer in brookline, which is a wealthy suburb of boston. Mary Lee was full of creativity, with a home filled with her artwork displayed and created on print media like canvases, sketchbooks, and framed photographs. her printer was not entirely crucial to her artwork, yet, meaningful enough for her to thank me for fixing it by including me on her upcoming digital project. while world knows her as an artist, myself and a few students like me know her a patron. she paid me to be the project manager on island dogs, an ipad application for children whose display was entirely formed by renderings of her hand-drawn and painted artwork. she paid me at a rate of 150 US$ because that is what a professional engineer quoted her at to build the application and when i heard that i asked for the same. more than the money that landed in my bank account, which totaled more than i had ever seen in my life, i received hands-on experience with the practical part of software engineering that i first enjoyed in high-school and missed in all my classes in college. while much of my emptiness could not be filled by her patronage, Mary Lee and her generous patronage started to fill my wallet with money i could use to participate in society and with a passion that i could share with friends. i became a software engineer because of her great faith in me.
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