“When I was a child, I was quite adept at taking things apart. Putting them back together on the other hand...”
This is a story I casually tell clients as I have their notebook computer splayed out all over the room. They think that I am teasing them, and I am in part, but as with most jesting, there lies a kernel of truth. And the truth is, in my life I have taken apart many more things than I have put back together, caused myself more problems than I have fixed, and started more projects than I have finished. I find that learning is bold, messy, and full of unforeseen consequences. Mine is a tale of learning.
My name is Jonathan Hawkes, and I am a TECHHEAD.
I began my odyssey into computer programming when I was seven years old. I started out by writing simple games in BASIC on my friend’s Commodore 64. We would spend the better hours of the day punching away at the integrated keyboard, testing, modifying and testing again. We would draw out sprites onto graph paper, convert our makeshift bitmap into hexadecimal, input the figures into our program and enjoy the fruits of our hard-earned artistic labor. Then long after sundown, we would give a simple salute, power down the machine, and say a solemn goodbye to our wasted day’s effort. (At that time, my friend had no floppy drive.)
The subsequent years passed in similar fashion. Games, robots, lasers, etc. — Some were built; all were taken apart; few survived. BBSs were the primary mode of communication. L.O.R.D. and TradeWars rocked. Apogee was the coolest company ever.
Then Al Gore said, “Let there be internet.” And there was internet. The local college had a dial-up gateway that would allow terminal-based access to Gopher, Usenet and the WWW (through the Lynx browser). Way cool. I would page through binary Usenet groups while capturing output to a text file within HyperTerminal. I wrote a UUEncoder/Decoder in C and had instant access to a far larger range of games and other content than any BBS to which I had been a member.
More years passed. My family subscribed to a “real” dial-up account. It came with a finite amount of hosted web space and CGI access. Bingo. I soon discovered that Perl was more suited to the challenge of building web applications than C, and my first Perl project was a sort of simple wiki (circa 1995) called the ScrawlWall (which was just a text box that anyone could modify and save to leave a short note or ASCII art). That same year, I also developed an AJAX precursor, the JavaScript ScrawlWall, which could be saved and loaded without ever leaving the page. Before shutting the project down in 1998, I hosted over 8,000 ScrawlWalls.
After that began my career. As an independent contractor, I developed numerous web sites as well as a (then impressive) cross-browser DHTML library called Pane DOM. This was back when Netscape Navigator only allowed manipulation of content through “layers” and Internet Explorer had much of the same limited capabilities that it does now. Being as impressive of a (still) teenager as I was, I was offered a full-time job by one of my clients. I was newly married (Yikes! Kids these days), so I jumped at the opportunity. This was near the time the first dot com bubble burst. My company proceeded to sink over 3 million dollars into advertising and not a tenth of that into development. Though we had an economic development grant of over a half a million, the plug was pulled on our project before we ever had a finished product (or spent the money). Brilliant!
However my boss, who was one of those really great guys you work for once in a lifetime, managed to keep the team working for a while on various other projects (with remarkably similar outcomes). In the end, we did manage a Cobol-to-Java rewrite of a popular online commodity futures and options trading platform. And I led the development and maintenance for a number of years.
Salute. Power down. Say goodbye.
The problem with having a job that requires your mind is that when you lose your mind, your job will soon follow. So once my project no longer required my guardianship, and I could no longer stand the sight of it, I did what any reasonable person would do. I quit my well-paying job and became a professional ski patroller.
For any other kind of person, this may have been the end of the story. But for a select few there will always be a draw, an inexplicable force that compels one to the soft glow of a computer display and the distinctly stale aroma of the great indoors. So a number of years later, I traded in my ski boots for house shoes and returned to the home office. Thus TECHHEAD was (re)born.
Are you seeing a pattern here? I am a firm believer in reincarnation. I just believe that we have one lifetime in which to accomplish it. So now I am back where I started. But I am learning. I am building. And starting with this, my first blog post, I am sharing. Today I hope to build something truly great, scrap it, and start again tomorrow with the same enthusiasm and perhaps just a little bit wiser.
