A friend asked me how I got into technology. It was a fair question because I had gone to school for molecular biology and, by December 2008, I was still six credits short of the degree.
I had been skipping classes, earning pretty mediocre grades, and staying up day and night with server racks. I wanted to understand systems, storage, Linux, Unix, HP-UX, Tru64, distributed systems, LAMP, SOA, and basically every other technical phrase I could find in a book or on a screen. Some of those things were useful immediately. Some were just the next thing I did not understand yet, which was usually enough to keep me awake.
I did not have a detailed career plan. I found something I was good at and spent most of my time learning it.
My first years in the work were hands-on. At CES Controls I was doing network and systems administration, programming, and field work. At the University of Colorado Boulder I moved into senior systems administration and security work. I was promoted there in January 2003. At the same time, I co-founded Praxis Technology and served as its president and CTO. Praxis ran from January 2003 into January 2007, overlapping the full-time jobs because apparently one job was not enough to answer all of the questions I had.
Systems work gave me direct feedback. The network had to pass traffic. The storage had to hold the data. The server had to come back. If something failed, somebody had to figure it out and keep working until it ran again.
From 2004 to 2006 I worked on systems and networks at SimAuthor in Boulder. The company built flight-data visualization and simulation software. That meant taking information from an aircraft and turning it into something people could replay, inspect, and use for safety, training, and analysis. In March 2006, Westar Aerospace acquired SimAuthor for $8 million in cash. The announcement described a Colorado software and services company working in flight operations and simulation. I was responsible for systems, networks, security, engineering labs, and an in-house data-center rebuild.
By September 2006 I was at Beatport as a senior systems administrator. Beatport had started only two years earlier as a download store for DJs. It was still a relatively small company when I joined, but the store was already asking the bigger questions that made the job interesting. How do you keep an online music business available when the customers are spread across time zones? How do you process and store a growing catalog without letting the infrastructure bill run away? How much of the company can you build with open-source systems and a team that is learning almost as fast as the business is growing?
I was promoted to lead the technology function in January 2007. My responsibilities expanded into the team, architecture, budgets, and planning for continued growth.
By the end of 2008, when my friend asked for advice, I had spent a little more than two years trying to stay ahead of Beatport's growth. I wrote back that the company had gone from around 20 employees to around 120 during that period. I also wrote numbers about company revenue that were the way I understood them at the time, but the larger point was the pace. I had to study harder because a system that worked for the earlier company would not automatically work for the next version of it.
I did not feel finished. I enjoyed the work and my day-to-day life, but there was a lot more to learn. Most of my confidence came from doing the same cycle repeatedly: read about a system, build it, find the problems, fix them, and document enough for somebody else to use it.
School mattered, and being six credits short was not a badge I was trying to manufacture. It was simply the truth of how my attention moved. The education I could not stop pursuing was down in the basement, attached to a rack, waiting for me to understand why it was not doing what I expected.
I told my friend that my path had been to learn a trade in as much detail as possible and find ways to make that knowledge useful to other people. It was the only example I could give from my own life. I also told him to let me know how things went.
I was still six credits short of the molecular biology degree. I was also running the systems behind a growing online music company. Both facts were true, and neither had a neat ending in December 2008.