How It Happened

I was never really very techy. I was however lucky enough to attend at least one school with a small lab of some variety of old Macintosh PC, with all the staple nostalgic ‘educational’ software packages like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, The Oregon Trail and so on, so I was exposed to PCs early enough and had access family computers after that. When my brother or parents would let me use their PCs, I’d spend hours engrossed in dinky kid’s games like Lil’ Howie’s Fun House and Gobliiins, or randomly clicking on stuff in Minesweeper or Solitaire.

Despite these early experience fostering a love of gaming that would eventually bring me to more grown up titles like Quake, Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires and Baldur’s Gate, I never really thought too much about how the machines I was using really worked. Nobody in my family or immediate surroundings worked in IT or an IT adjacent field. That’s not to say I didn’t have the appetite to be more active in my computing. As a teen my best friend and I tried our hands at making our own games in RPG Maker XP and poured hours into making some pretty impressive custom units for our biggest obsession; Warlords: Darklords Rising (until my friend’s PC went on the fritz and wiped out all of our hard work out), but it never really occurred to me that with some dedication regular people could do things like delve into the inner workings of their operating systems, read and tweak source code or write whole programs by themselves. For me people who did things like that, and made the games I played or the word processors I used, were something like wizards; sure if I thought hard enough about it, I’d think it was cool, but it wasn’t even worth thinking about because well, just like I wouldn’t ever learn to shoot lightning bolts from my hands, there was no way I’d ever write a computer program.

I didn’t know that I was lucky enough to be born at a time when the family computer could be a massively powerful creative tool, beyond just doodling futuristic tanks and monster trucks in MS Paint. I thought they were just things you used in the library or your brother’s room, played games on or did your homework with, using them exactly how they were designed to and then just left alone. I just took it for granted that they existed, as if they had materialised out of thin air without decades of human ingenuity and a ton of trial and error.

So, how did it happen? How did it all change for me? The breakthrough, the moment I unplugged from Matrix (or plugged into, your choice of metaphor) for the first time came pretty late in my life with the advent of Windows 10. By that time I had owned several PCs over the years and had even just built my first gaming PC. I was running Windows 8.1 at the time and was pretty happy with things now that the .1 update had banished that weird Metro touch UI to the void, when suddenly I started getting all these prompts about updating to Windows 10, which Microsoft was kind enough to offer me for – wait for it – totally free! I heard horror stories about home users and even enterprises being upgraded against their will, sometimes with catastrophic data loss. I heard about adverts in the start menu, pre-installed Candy Crush and a host of privacy issues. So I started researching how to dig into the registry and kill this update that I didn’t want. This had me all fired up. Whether my fears were overblown or not, I just didn’t like the feeling that I wasn’t in charge of my computer.

Then, one day I came across some equally fired up people on various forums and blogs, talking about something called ‘Linux’, which came in so many flavours you’d swear it was ice cream. These evangelists stoked the flames of my discontent further and whispered that the fruit of knowledge is delicious and I ought to take a bite. I became more and more intrigued. Besides, Linux’s mascot, a tubby and content looking penguin, just felt so decidedly un-corporate.

I was sold. I installed Puppy Linux 6.0 “Tahrpup” on my tiny Samsung NC10 netbook, because that’s just about all that would run on it. It was a gateway drug: next came Peppermint Linux, CentOS and soon afterwards I was dual booting Linux Mint on my desktop, until finally I decided I didn’t need that Windows drive after all. The Linux bug had bitten me. I started breaking things,tweaking config files, trying to run Steam games and software from my Windows days on my new system and finding workarounds or alternatives wherever that didn’t pan out. I covered my walls hand drawn diagrams of the Linux file system, command cheat sheets and yes, one or two drawings of Tux. I became familiar with philosophy of free and open source software, key (and often divisive) figures like Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and of course, Steve “Developers, Developers, Developers” Balmer. I wanted to know more about how my PC worked, how my network worked and how I could make them do things that I wanted it to.

Now here I am, seven years later. I’ll admit, it’s often been an uphill battle. My education and degrees were non-technical and my career likewise. As petty as it is, sometimes I would get jealous of all the very skilled people that I encountered who really embody that ‘hacker’ archetype and who got into this world before they could even tie their own shoes, after their dad or mom taught them BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20 or something. I didn’t really grasp the idea that in my late 20s or early 30s, if I wanted to badly enough, I could still learn these things and maybe even put them to use outside of my after work tinkering hours. But I’m on my way now, getting my first certifications. I even made up with Microsoft enough to get my Microsoft Office Master Specialist certification and Microsoft Technical Associate 98-381: Introduction to Programming Using Python qualification and to learn to use stuff like Power Automate to make my working life much easier. My scripts and programmes are still eldritch abominations, but hey, they kind work somehow (not to brag, I’ve got Hello World programmes under my belt in 3+ languages). As of a year or two, I’ve started being involved in open source projects, helping triage issues, and yes, even having some of my own small PRs and minor bug fixes merged. Our home is littered with Raspberry Pis, running things like Pi Hole and whatever random project I’m interested in tinkering with this week. I also have some VPSs running various server applications for my personal use.

Some 30-something years into this life, it’s finally dawned on me. I like doing this stuff, and though it very much still sometimes feels like trying to rewire my own brain without anaesthesia, I think I can do it. Maybe even eventually make a career out of this. I can honestly say, I’m excited about what lies ahead. And so, I figured I’d share some of that journey here, as unadorned and honest as I can. Sometimes it might be something new I’ve learned, a problem I wrecked my head over, or it’ll be nostalgia tinged flashbacks like this. Either way, if you like this kind of thing, do check back sometime.