The Coleco Years
My first introduction to coding was in fourth grade when my dad brought home a Coleco Adam home computer. I have no idea where it came from or why it ended up in our house but my brother and I were instantly hooked by our newfound access to classics like Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, and of course, my favorite, Dig Dug.
At the age of 8 or 9, I had no idea what software development or coding was, but thanks to this relic from another era, I started exploring. In the stack of cartridges that came with the computer was a funny little game where you guided a turtle across the screen. You’d give it commands like “FORWARD 50” or “RIGHT 30,” and it would leave behind some very rudimentary line art. When you inevitably overshot or undershot your target, you could always use “CLEARSCREEN” to start fresh.
It came with a very friendly user manual filled with pictures and programming challenges, and I would spend hours learning to manipulate that little turtle. Years later, I found out this digital terrapin was an implementation of SmartLogo, an educational language developed in the late 1960s to introduce kids to programming.
For countless kids like me, it was a gateway into the principles of computer science and software engineering. It wasn’t long before I graduated to Apple BASIC on our brand-new, state-of-the-art Apple IIGS, and later, Turbo Pascal.
Stolen Passwords at 14.4K Baud
I kept following that passion through middle and high school, where I learned to build a few text-based adventure games inspired by the classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I also discovered bulletin board systems, or BBSs, like FrEdMail, where you could post and reply to other users and slowly download pictures or other files.
I still remember the sound of the 14.4K modem kicking in. That weird hum, the static, and that high-pitched screech that somehow meant things were working. By today’s standards it was all incredibly basic, but at the time it felt like magic. Up until then, computers were solitary. The idea of using one to talk to someone else hadn’t even crossed my mind.
I accessed these BBSs, and later other services including FTP, Gopher, and a new underdog called the World Wide Web, via my Information Systems teacher’s computer. This class was a core requirement in my high school and while most of the time we were screen printing t-shirts or learning the basics of woodworking, my interest gravitated toward this new thing called “The Internet”.
My teacher also taught night classes at Rutgers, which meant he had access to their faculty network. One day in class, he showed us how to connect to it and how we could access not just Rutgers’ directories, but ones from other universities and networks too. Other than a few basics, he didn’t really know how to use any of it.
None of this stuff came with a manual.
I convinced him that since I knew some stuff about computers because I had one at home (sound logic), and that if he let me on it, I could write a paper and teach him how to better use these tools. He agreed, and it wasn’t long before I had quietly installed a key logger on the machine that I’d snuck into school on a 3.5” floppy disk. I was able to easily record and retrieve his (unencrypted) password, and later that afternoon my brother and I were “surfing the internet” for hours at home.
While he may not have agreed with my approach, John Bulina may have been the most influential teacher I had at Haddon Township High School.
Hacking My Degree
I enrolled for college at Montclair State University to continue my studies in Computer Science. Truthfully, I was pretty annoyed that I didn’t go to my first choices, including Stevens Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or Drexel University for a “real” engineering program. But after seeing the annual tuition, even with my 50% scholarships, it was clear I was destined for a state school. Still, Montclair State proved to be a perfect playground to not only properly learn computer science but also explore the growing number of new tools and technologies that were quickly becoming available to individuals.
Between formally learning the fundamentals, which consisted mainly of C, C++, and Assembly language, I also started to explore “hipper” tools like HTML, CSS, and Linux. I leaned into my hacker instincts quite a bit during this time, and freshman year I got my first taste of viral success when a few buddies and I built and moderated a campus-wide teacher rating and review system.
Built initially to figure out which computer science professors to steer clear of, it quickly caught the attention of a larger audience and became a bit of a sensation for a minute. Eventually the administration caught on, and while they didn’t know it was us, we shut it down as a precaution.
I also had a few run-ins with the local IT department, mostly from poking around the vulnerabilities in the Novell Network. But after I helped remove a nasty boot sector virus that was crashing computers across campus, they decided to bring me on and put my “talents” to better use.
During that time, I helped build out the Ethernet network that connected the student dorms to the main campus. A few years later, I installed the first Wi-Fi setup in the provost’s office. You could feel the momentum. In just a few short years, the campus had gone from wiring dorms for Ethernet to rolling out a campus-wide wireless network.
On the academic side, I learned to follow my interests, and I suppose some of my professors saw it and let me start to design my own electives. I remember building a sunspot simulator and modeling tool for a professor in the physics department.
I helped lead a small team of students where we built, for credit, a Beowulf cluster, a distributed supercomputer fashioned out of decommissioned computers. A buddy and I circumvented a probability and statistics requirement by building another modeling tool for our professor’s research using a new language called Java.
By my senior year I was taking graduate-level computer science classes to fulfill undergrad electives, to the point that it was almost a game to see how far I could push it.
When I left Montclair State in the spring of 2000, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do, but I knew I had cobbled together a budding skillset that might prove valuable somewhere.
Going Remote Before Remote Was Cool
During my last semester, I managed to land an interview at Lucent Technologies in their Systems and Networking Group, one of the top networking and IT companies at the time. While they were based in New Jersey, my team operated out of Westford, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. My manager in Bedminster handed me a laptop and monitor and told me I could work remotely, which was still a pretty novel concept.
I was expected to travel to Westford for about a week each month. I usually stayed in Cambridge, where I logged countless hours at the The Coop, Harvard & MIT’s longstanding shared bookstore. The rest of the time, I was flying or driving to client sites around the country, maintaining and upgrading software on Lucent’s ATM networking switches embedded at companies like Adelphia Cable, Williams Communications, and others.
It wasn’t particularly exciting. After spending a few weeks on a job site in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was told to cancel my return flight. The contract had been extended and I’d be staying at least another six weeks. I have nothing against Tulsa, but I had no interest in spending that much time there.
Back home, I had started chasing another interest. I was playing in a band, and music was becoming a bigger part of my life. I pretended not to see the email, boarded my flight back to New Jersey, and resigned the following Monday.
Getting Fired The Right Way
After flirting with the freedoms of unemployment for a short stint, it became clear it wasn’t a viable long-term path. One morning at the grocery store, my debit card was declined.
Apparently I was down to my last $8.32 in my bank account.
My chest tightened. I stood there at the register, card declined, and for a second I wanted to blame the machine. But it wasn’t that.
I was broke.
Later that afternoon, I leaned on my roommate’s girlfriend. Her dad was a VP of “something or other” at ITT Industries, a defense contractor with a local office in Clifton, New Jersey. It was about ten minutes from my house, tucked in a strip mall off Route 3 next to a Barnes & Noble. After a quick interview, I was offered a job as an embedded systems engineer.
I accepted, but only on the condition that any project I worked on couldn’t actively contribute to the death of another human being. At the time, ITT was doing a lot of missile defense work out of that facility, and I wanted to stay as far away from that as I could. I guess I wasn’t the first person to raise that concern, so they put me on a project upgrading software on the Army’s field radios.
My new job came with a fancy government clearance and involved upgrading the embedded software’s low-level network APIs. This was an equally fancy way of saying I had to change something like this:
// Before
fancy_SMTP_v1_call() { }
// After
fancier_SMTP_v2_call() { }
about 50,000 times across the codebase. It didn’t take me long to write a Perl script to tackle this glorified copy-paste and close out the ticket.
After a few weeks of similar approaches, I suppose I started attracting some attention from my peers, and not in a good way. Apparently I had yet to learn that if the company was contracted to take two weeks to complete a task, my job was to complete it in two weeks, not 20 minutes. I was told to slow down.
Naturally, I refused.
This was my first firsthand look at government inefficiency in action. I didn’t see much value in being an overachiever at a place like this, so I kept finding ways to automate weeks of work into a few hours.
Once I realized ITT cared more about time spent than actual results, I started optimizing my own schedule instead. I’d come in late, take long lunches, and head out early when I could. On our 9/80 schedule, I made sure to be “working” on the day everyone else was off, which usually meant checking in at the office for an hour, then walking across the parking lot to Barnes & Noble, where my buddy Mikey Way worked in the music section. I’d hang out with him until lunch, then head home for the day.
And when I wasn’t at my desk, I’d casually drop that I was working out of one of the hardware labs. We had three that I had clearance for, so it was nearly impossible for anyone to keep track.
I wasn’t lazy or incompetent - I just had other plans. I’d already found an old 5,000 square foot gym in downtown Montclair and was figuring out how to turn it into a music club. Outside of work, I was playing in bands, throwing basement shows, and building a network of local and touring acts. It felt like the start of something real, something that mattered.
Eventually, the act wore thin. My manager, Debbie, was on to me. One afternoon I was called into a meeting with her and the division VP. It was one of those moments where you know exactly what’s coming the second you step into the room.
They danced around it at first, asking if everything was okay, if I was struggling with substance abuse or personal issues. Finally, he just asked, “Do you think you’re doing work here?”
At that point, I stopped dodging. I told him about the inefficiency, how I’d been told to slow down, and how management seemed totally disconnected from the team.
Debbie didn’t appreciate the honesty, but he did.
Once she stepped out and it was just the two of us, he asked what I actually wanted to do.
I told him about the club, the space in Montclair, the bands. He lit up with energy, said his wife managed a jazz club in town, and told me to get out while I still could. “Don’t end up like me,” he said.
Before I left his office that day, he told me he’d do what he could to buy me some time. Said the next time I was called in, don’t fight it. Just know he had my back.
Six weeks later, I was called back into the office.
This time it was him, Debbie, and a few other people. In hindsight, probably HR or security.
Debbie was grinning.
I knew it was time.
They said they had to let me go and made me sign a bunch of papers, but I wasn’t expecting what came next.
I knew the past six weeks were about keeping me on the payroll a little longer, but he’d also lined up a severance that was more than fair. Maybe even generous. He told me to use it to get the club off the ground.
Debbie scowled.
I never saw him again. To this day, I don’t even remember his name. But he was one of those rare people who show up at the right moment and quietly change the direction of your life without ever asking for anything in return.
Looking back, the 18 months I spent at ITT weren’t really about software or defense work. It was about figuring out what I didn’t want my life to be. I saw how easy it was to get stuck, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen.
I left with some seed capital, a key to an empty gym in Montclair, and no real idea how to build a business, let alone a music club.
But I figured the same curiosity and hacker instincts that got me this far would probably be enough to get me through whatever came next.