30 Years of Programming at 44 Years Old

In 1995, I built my first website. It was a Metallica fan page. Black background, red text, animated GIFs of pixelated flames, a MIDI file that autoplayed "Enter Sandman" whether you wanted it to or not. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever made and I was only 14.

I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that if I typed the right words into Notepad and saved the file with .html at the end, something would appear in Netscape Navigator that didn't exist before I made it. That feeling of conjuring something from nothing hooked me immediately.

By 1998, I was one of the kids in computer shop tasked with redesigning our high school's website. It was a technical high school where kids learned trades like HVAC, automotive, masonry, IT, etc. Our IT shop teachers supervised us as we figured it out. Same tools I'd been using at home: Notepad, HTML. No frameworks, no build steps, no dependencies. Just text files that turned into something the whole school could see and use.

There was something pure about that. We were students building something real, supervised by teachers who understood the work. No pitch decks or growth metrics. They just wanted us make it work, make it useful, and learn something in the process.

Growing and Learning

The next 15 years were a blur of growth. I learned PHP, then Java, then Ruby, then ColdFusion, then Node.js. I worked at Harvard building school-wide course evaluation and inventory management systems for research labs. I built tournament systems for Riot Games, streaming platforms for media companies, backend services for mobile games you've probably played. I got good at the craft. I learned how to build systems that didn't fall over, how to write code that other people could read, how to lead teams without being an asshole about it.

Then in 2016, I found Go. Something clicked that hadn't clicked in years. Here was a language that felt like the tools I started with since it was simple, direct, and with no magic, but capable of building the distributed systems the modern internet demanded. No runtime to babysit and no framework churn. It was just a compiler, a standard library that actually had what you needed, and code that did exactly what it looked like it did.

I went all in. Compiled languages. Concurrent systems. I started caring deeply about performance, about memory, about what was actually happening when my code ran. I read RFCs for fun. I traced packets through the kernel. I wanted to understand the machine, understand the network, not just ship features on top of abstractions I couldn't explain.

For a while, it felt like the joy was back that I didn't know I lost. Programming with purpose. Building things that worked because I understood why they worked. I climbed the ladder. Senior engineer then to Staff engineer. I worked on CDNs pushing packets at the edge. I wrote eBPF programs to measure network latency at the kernel level. I helped build the infrastructure that routes traffic for millions of users. The problems got harder and more interesting. The compensation got better. By any reasonable measure, I had made it.

Tapped Out

And then I looked around.

The industry I had grown up in that promised to connect people, to democratize information, to make the world smaller and more accessible had become something else entirely. The fun was and the discovery was gone. What remained was a ruthless machine optimized for extraction.

I watched companies I respected pivot from building useful things to chasing metrics that looked good in pitch decks. I sat in meetings where the question was never "does this help anyone?" but "how do we increase engagement?" I saw smart and talented engineers burn themselves out building features designed to manipulate rather than serve. The word "hustle" got thrown around like a badge of honor instead of the warning sign it actually is.

The VCs wanted growth at any cost and the founders wanted exits. The middle managers wanted to hit their OKRs. And the users? They became the product. Their attention, their data, and their habits were all commodified and sold to the highest bidder.

I burned out. Multiple times. Not the cute kind of burnout where you take a long weekend and feel better. The kind where you stop eating. The kind where you lose weight you can't afford to lose. The kind where the barbell sits untouched in the garage for months because you can't find the will to pick it up, even though lifting was one of the few things that kept you sane. The kind where you're sitting alone wondering how you got here and whether any of it was worth it.

And through all of it, I was raising my son. He's autistic, and he's brilliant, and he's growing up in a world that this industry helped create. A world designed to hijack attention, to exploit dopamine loops, to turn human connection into engagement metrics. Every dark pattern I helped normalize, every addictive feature I stayed silent about, every compromise I made to hit a deadline. I think about what that world means for him. For all the kids who deserve better than to be optimized against.

I worked at companies during this era that were doing genuinely interesting technical work. Layer 1 networking. Real-time packet routing. Security research. The engineering was excellent. But even in those places, I could feel the pressure of the constant pull toward whatever would juice the numbers, whatever would impress the board, whatever would get us closer to the next funding round or acquisition.

This wasn't what I signed up for.

The kid in 1995 who made a Metallica fan page wasn't dreaming of surveillance capitalism. The teenager in 1998 who built his high school's website wasn't imagining a future where every click would be tracked, analyzed, and monetized. I got into this because I loved making things. Somewhere along the way, the industry decided that making things wasn't enough anymore and instead you had to scale them, monetize them, disrupt them, exit them.

Fuck that.

End Game

I'm 44 today. If I'm lucky, I have maybe 20 more years of writing code in me. Probably less at the pace this industry moves. That's not a lot of time, but it's enough to be deliberate about how I spend it.

Here's what I've realized... The skills I've accumulated over 30 years— the system design, the networking knowledge, the understanding of how software actually works at a low level—those skills have value beyond making rich people richer. They can be used to build things that matter. Things that respect the people who use them. Things that don't treat privacy as an obstacle or users as resources to be harvested.

I'm thinking about co-ops and nonprofits and community organizations that need software but can't afford to have their data sold to advertisers. I'm thinking about tools that are secure by default, that don't phone home, that do one thing well and then get out of the way. I'm thinking about the kind of software I would have wanted to use when I was 14. The software that felt like it was made by someone who gave a damn.

The irony isn't lost on me. I spent years building expertise in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, and now I want to use that expertise to help people who are actively trying to avoid the cloud. I learned how to scale services to millions of users, and now I'm more interested in software that works for thousands. I got really good at the game, and now I want to play a different one.

Maybe that's what 30 years buys you: the clarity to know what you actually want.

I don't have all the answers. I'm still figuring out what this next chapter looks like. But I know it involves simpler tools, smaller communities, and software that exists to serve rather than extract. I know it involves working with people who share those values.

The Metallica fan page is long gone and so is the high school website. But the feeling I had when I made them, that sense of wonder at creating something from nothing, that belief that I could build things that mattered, that's still there. It just got buried under two decades of sprints and standups and growth metrics.

The next 10 to 20 years will be about protectng my own peace and working on things that make me proud of myself.