Red Squirrel's Nuts

In December, 2000

My commute from Warrenville to Skokie reached the peak of nasty as the snow started to fall in Chicagoland. After a couple 2-3 hour snowy drives home in creeping traffic, I started sleeping at my grandparents’ place in nearby Evanston whenever it snowed. But, the bad commute was definitely still worth the effort. I had transitioned from my toy assignments from Irv and Steve to working on bug fixes in our flagship product StarshipSchool. I was in over my head, but I now sat near the developers, so I could ask questions when I got stuck. One young developer named David was particularly helpful. I’m not sure how useful I was, especially at first. We tended to work alone, so I spent a lot of time just trying to understand how things worked in a Perl Mason app that ended up talking with another system using another programming language called Sequel. I soon found out Sequel was spelled SQL, and that it was used for working with relational data, which we stored in something called My Sequel.

I had the opportunity to learn from several different helpful people, including Joel Grossman, our director of product development. I sat in meetings where I heard terms like normalization and denormalization. I remember Joel explaining to me that there are programmers who build, and programmers who use what is built. I remember a woman telling me that it was a shame that Perl was my first programming language, and that I should have started with a language called C, so that I could understand more of what was really happening. I tried to take it all in stride.

I used my new favorite search engine Google to constantly look up all of these terms and concepts that I wasn’t familiar with. One day the topic of discussion was something called MVC. I looked it up on Google and found myself on a page in something called the WikiWikiWeb. The site looked pretty great, because almost all of the terms I didn’t understand were hyperlinks to pages that described those terms. I didn’t grok MVC, but I wandered around and found something called Extreme Programming. It sounded intriguing, but I had bugs to fix.

[This year, I blogged the year 2000, the year I started programming.]

In November, 2000

Irv Shapiro, the CEO of Edventions, took me aside and let me know it was time for me to learn to program. The company was tightening its belt and starship.com was being de-prioritized. But, if I could get up-to-speed on Perl, I could make myself useful. He left a dog-eared copy of a book with a Camel on it on my desk, and walked away.

I grasped the magnitude of the opportunity, so the Camel Book was my constant companion for the next few weeks. I took notes as I read it, writing down strange-sounding concepts such as scalars and de-referencing. It was definitely over my head, but some of it sunk in. Then I looked around for a more newbie-friendly book, something that would help me learn something called CGI, which apparently is a program that sits behind web forms. I found Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web. I still remember stealing moments to read that book. Huddled in my snow-covered car outside my aunt-in-law’s apartment building, greedily digesting the knowledge I was so hungry for, finally available to me in the right-sized chunks. That little book got me over the hump.

Later that month, I showed Irv my first CGI program, running on one of our Linux severs. He then gave me a pet project to solve. I had to search a big text file based on a bunch of different criteria submitted from a form, and display the results. I attacked the problem, and later that day, showed him my solution. He wasn’t expecting me so soon, and apparently he was impressed. He called over our CTO, Steve Bunes to have a look. Steve was apparently pleased with what he saw and casually mentioned that we should get me involved with the development team.

I was happy and excited about what might happen next.

[This year, I’m blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]

In September, 2000

After an interesting but mostly insignificant summer at Edventions, I found myself more confident in my abilities, but less confident about the future of the company. People were talking about the “dot-com bubble” and I noticed some serious faces among the sales team and leadership of the company. My boss Carolyn and I were hard at work on starship.com, but the content management system we’d used wasn’t living up to its promise and we’d had to call in outside help.

We brought in outside help from the professional services segment of the company that supported the (open source) content mangement system. This was my first up-close exposure to software developers, and what struck me immediately was that they were flown in from Boston and put up in a nearby hotel. The amount of money we were spending just on their travel and hotel surprised me, having come from the field of family therapy where that sort of money would have paid a month’s salary. I wasn’t envious, but observing this led me to question why Edventions would pay that much, which helped me understand the perceived value of what we were building. It energized me toward software development, because I loved the idea of creating value, and it seemed like value flowed out of the act of developing software.

We also brought in help from an interesting company named Homeboyz Interactive. They were a web design firm up in Milwaukee, and working with them taught me some completely different lessons. The name of the company caught me off guard, so I dug into their background. Homeboyz took guys off the streets and helped them get into web technology. I’ll never forget road-tripping up to Milwaukee with my boss Carolyn, sitting down with Brother James Holub, and listening to him talk about how he could stop bullets. I was inspired, and it gave me another glimpse into the power of open information and open source. Some of the guys under Brother Jim’s guidance had become amazing web designers, on a small budget, and within a healthy business. Brother Jim’s passion for raising others up via learning about technology made a lasting impact on me.

[This year, I’m blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]

In May, 2000

I quickly learned that commuting by car from Warrenville to Skokie every day during rush hour wasn’t going to work. Thankfully my new boss, Carolyn, was flexible about it, and let me do an early-in, early-out commute. I would wake up at 4am, do a quick workout, and hustle to Skokie before traffic set in. Then I’d be out the office’s back door at 4pm every day, and home to Staci and Rose before the roads got crazy. Naturally, there were plenty of times when things would get complicated and I’d end up sitting in traffic for what felt like an eternity. This was frustrating, but most definitely worth the hassle.

My workspace was in this cool, old bedroom-like office, upstairs from the main Edventions crew. Wood floors, creaky doors, and an occasional mouse made my silent mornings feel surreal. Once people started to trickle in after 8am, some of the magic disappeared, though the camaraderie was welcome. My time was spent trying to figure out how to use this egrail content management system. I received some occasional guidance from Irv, who seemingly understood everything about everything, though not in an obnoxious way. He was always very curious and eager. I liked Irv. I wanted to figure out how to help him build a successful business.

Egrail felt overly complicated. It was weird, it was actually a web site that managed your web site. I needed to fill in some web forms in the right way, with the right stuff to make starship.com look the right way and have the right content. The craziest parts were these places where I had to copy and paste these strange incantations wrapped in <? and ?>. Not sure what that’s about.

[This year, I’m blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]

In April, 2000

On the day before my 26th birthday, I took the day off to interview at Edventions. I drove the long (painful) drive to Skokie (from Warrenville) and found my way to someone named Irv. Craptastic! Irv’s the flippin’ founder and CEO! He had me sit with one of his content editors who sorta quizzed me on HTML, online content editing, and general (non-techie) web knowledge. Then I spent some time in conversation with Irv. Wow, this felt right. The building was this cool 2 story, marble-y old building on the corner of Bronx and Dempster, and for some reason, it just felt like home to me, especially with Irv’s vision for the company. It all felt very alive and vibrant, especially compared to any previous job I’d ever had.

At the end of our conversation, Irv matched the combined income of my day job and side gig, plus a little more, and offered me the job. I accepted it. We shook hands. I got in my car and drove to a gas station. Then I got out of the car and called Staci. Then I called my family, friends, and other people. My life was changing, and although I grew tired of all the times my life changed when I was growing up (we moved around a lot), I had grown to relish change as an adult. I was thrilled to be involved in Edventions, a real, live dot-com startup!

Later that week, I met with my team at work and let them know I was leaving. They were surprised that I would walk away from the field of mental health. Interestingly, some of my clients were less surprised, and encouraged me in my decision. I’ve never regretted or second guessed my decision to change careers, and later that month, that’s exactly what I did. I was building starship.com (don’t bother going there now) using an open source content management system called egrail. This was the first of a series of projects where I found myself in over my head. The work was great. The commute sucked. But it was totally worth it.

[This year, I’m going to be blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]

In March, 2000

The Chicago area was starting to thaw. I started spending an increasing amount of time between my client appointments walking around nearby Hidden Lake. As I walked in circles, I pondered the possibilities of this unexpected idea of becoming a computer programmer. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me. I prayed about it, and felt peace about what I was considering. So I kept looking for opportunities.

Over a weekend, I was cleaning out my car and found a scrap of paper with a web address on it. I remembered the commercial I heard on the radio about a startup. I stuffed it in my pocket. When I had some time later, I pulled up the web site on my trusty Internet Explorer 5 lickety split with my super-fast new “broadband” connection. Well, the startup wasn’t in Chicago, it was in Skokie, a hellish 40 mile commute only possible by car from where I lived. Yet, what I saw on the site seemed to fit my background. The company, Edventions, was developing a product called StarshipSchool to help parents, teachers, and students use the web to collaborate on homework, progress reports, email, etc. I had a good feeling about the opportunity, so I emailed them, attaching my resume.

Within an hour of emailing Edventions, I received a reply asking me to call. I called and was talking with someone named Irv about what they were looking for. (I later found out he was the CEO. These sorts of encounters are one reason small companies can be so remarkable.) We set up a time for me to come to the office for an interview. This was all moving very fast, and I loved it. I felt like I was living in “Internet speed”, the instinctual decision making I had heard stories about over the previous couple years as dot-coms started dominating the news.

The interview was set for the day before my 26th birthday, April 3, and I was excited.

[This year, I’m going to be blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]

In February, 2000

I was a child and therapist, questioning whether I could become a software developer. My attempt at learning Java was stalling. The exercises in Java for Dummies didn’t seem to have any purpose. Even if I could get them to work (which I couldn’t), they didn’t seem to do anything useful. I was filled with doubt. Did I really want to switch careers? I had a good job and had just finished a master’s degree. Was I selling out?

After work, when I wasn’t writing for my About.com side job, I searched the web (sans Google) for local tech jobs. I marvelled at the long and impressive sounding lists of techno-acronyms that I needed to know in order to apply. I quickly realized that I was going to have to apply despite not knowing most of what they were looking for. Remarkably, I got an interview with a placement company who was looking for Java developers. I showed up and was unsurprised (but disappointed) when they cut the interview short when they looked more closely at my “resume”.

I kept looking for tech jobs. I even heard an ad for a Chicago “dot-com startup” on the radio. I wrote down the web address on a piece of paper, but soonafter lost it somewhere in my Chevy Lumina. I gave up on Java for Dummies, but dug deeper into HTML, and started learning some JavaScript. I wasn’t quite sure where this was heading.

[This year, I’m going to be blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]

In January, 2000

I was a child and family therapist. I worked in the Intensive Outreach Unit of the DuPage County Health Department. I had just finished my master’s degree in 1999 and was excited about my first gig as a “real” therapist. We worked in pairs and did in-home family therapy to prevent children and adolescents from being hospitalized for suicidal, homicidal, or psychotic behavior. We had a small case load and I was working with some great therapists. Compared to my cohorts from my master’s program, I felt like I’d found a great gig.

But I had another job too. I was the “Teen Advice” guide at About.com. I got the job to help pay the bills, but also because I’ve always been into computers, and was especially interested in the Internet since my uncle introduced it to me back in 1994. This job involved HTML, which felt magical to me, and I found that the time I spent coding HTML was giving me energy. I wanted to dig deeper into this seemingly magical art.

So, 10 years ago, between client appointments, I would hide out in my car in random parking lots reading Java for Dummies. Then I would go home and (when Staci and Rose were sleeping) try out what I learned. I worked hard at it for a while, and would get excited when I could make a button or JSomethingErOther appear on my PC, but it wasn’t sinking in. Applets seemed cool, I guess, but what’s with this javac thing? And all of these rules about public and static?

[This year, I’m going to be blogging the year 2000, the year I started programming.]