I want to write about my web development career and the story of how everything started. In the past I think I’ve always wanted to tell stories from my past that had some sort of specific moral or political purpose, but now with this new format I feel like telling other types of side stories that might mean a lot to me personally but I guess… I’m not sure why I never told these types of positive stories–maybe that’s what it is–this story is almost all positive and joyful. Writing for me has always been about coping with pain and trauma I think, at least my journal and much of my story writing. But if you want to win against pain and trauma and depression, a good defense is a good offense so I’m trying to write out the positive experiences and work through my joy as much as my trauma, slowly building and working toward a perspective that works for me and the people around me. And for God. I want my perspective to work for God too, even though I’m an atheist, like as a conceptual ideal, even though I know it’s not real. I hope that made sense.
Anyway, my career is something I’m really happy with, but the story to me is kind of trippy.
So I was in College Writing class in senior year in high school. The teacher gives us an assignment to build a website because, even though it’s a writing class, he’s super frustrated that the school was not teaching any sort of computer programming or web development of any kind, and looking back he was absolutely correct to be frustrated by that. So he did it himself, even if it wasn’t appropriate for the actual class. So he gives us like a week to work on it and I finished everything on the list of tasks on the first day, and I go up and ask him what to do next and he straight up accused me of lying and faking my way through the project, which really surprised me but we talked it out and I answered a bunch of questions about how I’d put the webpage together–I mean, it was pretty basic stuff. Like make a few paragraphs, wrap some text around an image, make a table with some data. But he was really impressed that I’d figured it out that quick and basically gave me the rest of the week to fuck around more with the website or go back to my other writings.
I think the final website I turned in had a bunch of marijuana legalization memes even though I think I’d only smoked pot like a couple times. This was 1997 so pot smokers were still quite hated.
Anyway, one day he takes me aside and tells me that I should give up on my dream of becoming a famous novelist and instead pursue computer programming of some sort.
I was offended. I don’t remember what I said but I remember it kind of pissed me off.
But he was right. He made some valid points. You got to be real famous as a novelist before you can make software development money.
So I went to Western Washington University for one quarter–semester? I dunno. For freaking English literature. I dropped out to smoke weed and party and that turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. Four years of English Lit? What the hell was I gonna do with that? I thought it would help me write a better novel. No, getting life experience and actually sitting down to write the novel is how you write a novel.
So I wrote a novel. By this point it’s like the year 2000. Some people loved this novel, some people thought it was super cringe and weird.
I don’t have it available anywhere because I remember it being super cringe as well.
Anyway, I built a very basic website for my book and — no, that’s right, I guess I have to admit that I had a spiritual experience and that I spoke to God and He told me to build a website all about marijuana legalization. He told me to admit that I was a drug dealer and talk all about it, to use my real name, and to try to open lines of communication to the ends of legalizing marijuana.
So I did that, and my novel was part of that.
And that was sort of what I did, but I didn’t have any thoughts of actually doing web dev as a career–wait, no that’s not true–I did give a half-assed attempt at getting into it. I took a correspondence course, where they mailed me literal paper books about web development that looked like they’d been printed on a home printer. But I didn’t get anywhere with that.
But then one day I was standing in a parking lot with my buddy and he tells me that he’s going to Bellingham Technical college for a one year web and graphic design degree. And just in that moment without even thinking about it, I decided to go with him.
So we tried to go to Bellingham but the last second they cancelled the whole program so we went down to Skagit college 45 minutes south of us.
You know, that all kind of feels actually less magical to me than it did before I wrote it out. Like I forgot that I’d already made a half-assed attempt at web development, so I was sort of remembering that moment in the parking lot as coming out of the blue, like a split second decision out of left field, but I guess it wasn’t completely unexpected.
So we went to Skagit for two years. He tried for a year or two to make something out of the web development, trying to run his own business doing Flash websites.
I took a different route though and did more programming intensive and less design. Better pay, less competition and works better with the way my brain works.
I can make stuff work. I don’t know how to make it look good.
So between the first and second year during the summer I remember I read a book on MS Access and Visual Basic, and attempted to build a disc golf tracking system so that disc golfers could keep track of their scores and strategies and discs and whatnot.
That was sort of the precursor of customd.app. I remember as I was building it asking myself why it can’t be abstracted to the point where one could customize it and use it to keep track of anything they might want. Funny to think that my idea for Custom Data Organizer really originated that long ago.
So after I graduated, I couldn’t find a job immediately so I started making games and made a second website for my writing and web development, separate from my “Get To Know a marijuana Dealer” (that was the name of my site).
The first game I made was called Dirty Marbles. My friend’s uncle had invented it and so he showed me a homemade board and taught me how to play.
So I built Dirty Marbles in Flash and ActionScript and within a month had a good functional game. I posted it to newgrounds.com which was the place to go back then for Flash animations and games. People liked the game decently but I got a bunch of comments like “dude that’s just a ripoff of parcheesi”.
So I looked it up and sure enough, Dirty Marbles was almost exactly like parcheesi. I told my buddy and he’s like “oh yeah they’re kind of similar”. No, they are pretty much the exact same game. A couple numbers are swapped but it doesn’t affect strategy in any way.
So then I write a second game called Kalin’s Battle Grid which was like checkers except each piece had hit points and attack points and you rolled dice and the pieces actually increased in HP or AP and you could choose how to distribute points and a whole lot of things were custom. You could set the width and height of the board, the number of pieces, number of bonus pieces etc. It also had an animated intro that I did all myself. Animations for attacks and missiles and exploding buildings and shit. All this only took two months all by myself. Seems crazy to get all that done in that time as a total beginner.
Flash and ActionScript was such an amazing platform that just made everything super easy. It’s not like that nowadays. It’s anything but easy, which means job security. Good for me. Bad for the whole rest of the internet community.
So then I had been failing at getting any interviews, but then someone from my high school who I’d never actually interacted with before, emailed me and asked me to come out to interview at a company he’d built called Jelly Barn. I remember driving out to an actual literal barn half an hour north of Bellingham and walked in and they had a huge beautiful conference table and I peeked into the main room to see where they were blasting Smack My Bitch Up by The Prodigy and had all these fancy new computers with actual flat-screen monitors. And I thought oh god I have to work here.
But then I didn’t get the job. They were doing a photo sharing application in flash. Flickr at the time was their most relevant competitor. I remember I wrote up a list of ideas for their product but they weren’t impressed enough but were honest with me that I was interesting but I just wasn’t far along enough in my learning.
Part of it was that my first two games hadn’t taken advantage of a lot of the newer Flash and ActionScript technologies like classes and I’d kind of hacked them together in a lot of ways.
So my third game was called Black Market Rebellion and this was even more intense. This game included a level editor where you could create levels just like the original Zelda. It had all the different types of tiles, ability to have doors that could take the player to other parts of the maps or connect to whole other maps. It had items and enemies. So it was a lot like the original zelda but it was a tank and you had a bunch of different types of weapons. You’d use the arrow keys to move and the mouse to aim. Then there were role playing concepts. Your tank and weapons got stronger and you could choose how to apply attributes. It had all the features of a typical action RPG but with a fully (well–mostly) functional level editor and a login system with a PHP backend that ran off my website. The backend had zero security but I didn’t care if people cheated. the game was free either way.
It’s kind of crazy to think of all the shit that I built in such a short time. I remember Dirty Marbles took a month, Battle Grid took two months and Black Market Rebellion I worked on for three months and had released a very basic alpha rough version of it to newgrounds before I —
I’m getting ahead of myself. So I had Black Market Rebellion on my website as I was working on it and I also had updated my website with a big sign that said “I will work two full days completely free, with no expectations of further employment, for anyone who needs anything in Flash ActionScript and is willing to give me a good review” — or something like that.
So JellyBarn got back ahold of me and brought me back in for another interview. They’d moved to Fairhaven which is basically southwest Bellingham.
They were impressed–or I guess the one guy who interviewed me–Matt–fuck, I’ll just say his name since I ain’t saying anything bad about him, the guy from my high school, but then he admitted that he hadn’t totally had permission to bring me in for an interview and they didn’t have any money to hire me but he was struggling with a problem and would like to take me up on my two day offer. He said he’d write a letter of recommendation or some shit.
So I remember I procrastinated on trying to solve his problem. I worked from home. He had sent me just a couple classes to work on, so he had sort of isolated the problem for me without giving over much of his codebase. I put it off a couple days before I worked on it which I don’t know why the fuck I did that, but then I remember I printed out their code. Literally printed out the code for all their classes and took it all to Shari’s in the middle of the night for dinner and I sat there in the booth and ate and read through their code.
Then I finally solved the problem using a static variable. Once I got through my anxiety about it, the solution was actually pretty obvious. So I took the solution back to him and turned out he’d never heard of static variables, where the variable is like global but attached to the class name instead of an object of the class. Golly, that’s like a terrible explanation isn’t it?
Anyway, he was impressed that I’d shown him something new, so he went down to the powers that be and convinced them to come up with enough money to hire me for two days a week at $10 per hour. This was technically more than I was currently making as a line cook but only by a dollar and this job required me to drive every day where the cook job did not and the cook job gave me free food, so all things considered, this job was actually making me less than my cook job.
But I sure as hell took it. Didn’t think twice about accepting that.
So I worked two days a week at 10 bucks an hour and was able to work it around my cook job, taking a few less hours over there. Then I think after a month or two they got the money to bring me to three days a week. I kept asking and hinting that I wanted to go full time and they kept telling me that they just didn’t have the money.
Then I went to a Pearl Jam concert at the Gorge in George, a huge outdoor amphitheatre that overlooks the columbia gorge. One of the most beautiful concert venues in the world, like five hours east of Seattle out in the middle of absolute nowhere.
Anyway, I take a good dose of shrooms. We’re camped out there in the campground of course. Pearl jam played for a good four hours total.
Then for the second time in this story, I had a spiritual experience where God told me to do something.
He told me to quit my cook job and just dive in all the way, commit myself to JellyBarn in the short term and to being a Flash developer in the long term. He told me to basically work five days a week for JellyBarn and give it everything I had and just accept that I would only get payed for three of those days.
I call it God, but only cuz that’s like, the easiest way to describe it. I mean, atheists have these kinds of spiritual experiences too. It’s just that–if we’re mindful and good at managing our own emotions, we can take value and understanding from it while still recognizing that it’s not technically quote-unquote “real”. It’s just our subconscious communicating with us.
So the next day I remember we stopped to eat some breakfast at this diner and I remember saying “I think I’m gonna quit my job tomorrow.”
So that’s what I did. I put in my official two week notice the next day.
When you’re high on a psychedelic, or when you have a spiritual experience like that, it’s very very important to wait at least 24 hours until you are good and sober and can think through your idea before actually executing on your decision. Sometimes these things can guide us off track. Or sometimes your sober mind can add to the idea and make it even better.
So then Monday when I went in to JellyBarn, I told Matt “I quit my cook job so I can focus on this now.”
“How do you plan to pay your rent?” he said.
“I dunno. I’ll live out of my car if I need to but I have a feeling it won’t come to that. Something always comes up.”
So he just turned and walked away in the middle of the conversation, which was just one of his quirks so it actually wasn’t abnormal.
So I sat down to work and half an hour later he came back and said, “Okay you’re on five days a week. And we’re gonna pay you for all five days.”
“I thought you didn’t have the money.”
“Yeah, we don’t know where the money is going to come from, but I told them what you said and we agreed that if you’re willing to show that kind of commitment then we can too and we will figure out how to pay for it.”