dive into mark

Welcome to my weblog. I hope you enjoy it. I just got hired for it.

That’s an oversimplification, but not by much. Here’s the story:

On September 30, Dave Winer linked me for a side project I was working on, PyManila. This link attracted the attention of several people, but this story only involves two of them. The first was my boss at the time, who followed the link and discovered my personal weblog for the first time, and quickly discovered my very personal essay on conquering drug and alcohol addiction. He called me the next day and told me in no uncertain terms that I would have to shut down my entire weblog immediately, before potential clients stumbled across it, realized that I worked for the company, and thereafter thought less of the company because they had recovered alcoholics working for them. (I’m not making this up; this really was his chain of thought. I didn’t believe it either, but I made him spell it out and repeat it, and I’m quite sure I have it right.)

Needless to say, things got very ugly very quickly. In fact, it rapidly led to an all-out power struggle within the company, at the end of which my boss was left standing and I was left fired, a conclusion which I promptly wrote about in my weblog. Although it was not my intent, the story generated lots of attention, including links from Cruel.com, Fark.com, and MetaFilter. It generated over 60,000 hits in 3 days, and it was even picked up by talk radio stations as far away as Toronto and as mainstream as CBS Radio. But that part of the story has already been told and is not particularly interesting, except to say that being the story-of-the-week is a lot less fun than it sounds. And, perhaps, to note in passing that I’m not very good at knowing when to keep my mouth shut, and I tend to err on the side of too much honesty and too full disclosure. It all comes, I suppose, of keeping too many secrets for too long, and knowing firsthand how expensive secrets can be.

But I digress.

The second person who found my weblog on September 30th was the CEO of a small, up-and-coming consulting company, based in DC but with field offices in New York and Raleigh, NC. Not only did he found his own company, but he’s been running it so well that, in the midst of the current tech slump, he was looking to expand. However, it was not simply my piddly little Python projects or my fledgling weblog that impressed him. He and I went to the same high school, long, long ago in an alternate universe we now call the 80’s. We were even in the same computer class, programming in Apple Pascal on the Apple ][e. (Hi Mr. Brodt. you’ll be happy to learn that, even now, you continue to have a direct positive impact on my life. What better compliment can you give a teacher? (Side note: isn’t it weird how, even after you become an adult, you can’t address your former teachers by their first names?)) All of which means that — and there’s really no way to say this without sounding arrogant — this particular CEO has admired my programming skills since he was 15.

And he came back to my weblog a week later to find that I was suddenly and fortuitously unemployed. And yesterday, after a 20-hour train ride (that should have been 12), an interview that started at 1 AM and ended at 4 PM, and several nerve-wracking days of negotiations, he hired me.

So as I was saying, it would be an oversimplification to say that I was hired because of my weblog. Or because of my book. Or Dave Winer’s link. Or what I did in college, or who I knew in high school. Or any specific work experience I’ve had in the past six years. (My technical interview barely touched on it; we mostly talked about OO theory and the similarities and differences between programming languages we’ve known and loved.)

In fact, this is the first job I’ve ever had where I can’t pinpoint anything specific that got me the job. I got my last job because of an in-house application I’d written that involved a SQL program that generated SQL subprograms and executed them (my interviewer was into meta-programming). The job before that, it was the wizards I’d created to simplify administrative tasks in our product (my interviewer knew they needed user interface help). The job before that, it was a project I’d done that got me in touch with a specific professor (my interviewer was a friend of his).

But this time, I can’t isolate anything like that. It’s the sum of my experiences, a side project of no apparent consequence, a Dave Winer link on a Sunday, a crossing of divergent paths, a lucky break. I’d call it good karma, except that karma is supposed to manifest itself over many lifetimes. It’s not like a crash diet; you’re not supposed to see results within 3 weeks. Maybe I’m the exception that proves the rule. Maybe I should just be grateful that I have a job, thank everyone who has supported me in the past few weeks, stop introspecting, and get back to work.

Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea.

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