Since this is a blog about my professional life, I can’t think of a better first post than this: how did I go from IT to Software?

To begin, the second iteration of my career in IT began around 2012. I was back in the United States from a stint teaching abroad in South Korea. I supervised a call center that supported Windows machines remotely. Our service was surveillance, and it was hardly glamorous. Still, I reworked my technical skills there for about three years. I also learned from one of the best managers I ever had simply how to be a manager, as well as how to work well in a corporate team.

I continued in similar work supporting both Windows and Apple computers for several years. I helped network admins set up the fiber. I created my own RAID arrays. I designed a new AD environment from scratch. I’ve probably crimped miles of ethernet cable. I recovered data that outgoing employees tried to delete. I did all that for several companies around Los Angeles, including three different studios.

The Warner Brother’s lot was the best place to play the Harry Potter mobile game.

It was during this time I developed an elementary appreciation for programming. This was something I never did in college because I wasn’t exactly a mathematical savant. However, I tired of not understanding how code works. So I enrolled in Udacity’s Intro to Programming course to get a better idea. I also learned Git version control during that time.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that I took to Python pretty quickly. When I write in Python, I experience coding less like Mathematics, and more like analytical writing, driven by informal logic. Writing code felt more like reading terse (or perhaps sometimes dense) philosophy, which I was quite used to.

Within about three months I experimented with my own APIs and Angular webpages. In several IT positions, I wrote customized PowerShell modules, often using principles like Classes to great success.

There is one day I can still remember, at one of those Studios, that finally made me determined to get out of IT. A team of us walked into a cavernous brick room about the size of a bedroom house, and saw little there except empty server racks, the debris of abandoned ethernet cables, and rumors that the place was haunted (I’m not joking). We deployed a new desktop to some network engineer, who spoke of this room like a wise old village elder tells the explorer never to go to that lost, plague-ridden, jungle city.

The story was simple: everything went to the cloud. Honestly, I don’t know why this network engineer was even in the room.

I contemplated that, as well as my time deploying servers, routers, and firewalls over the years. I came to a pretty quick conclusion: I don’t even like going into server rooms anyway, so I might as well adapt to the times, learn Infrastructure as Code, and pursue cloud tech forever.

It was about six months after that epiphany that took a job troubleshooting software, hosted in AWS cloud. My contributions to that company are a story for another time.

May I never crimp ethernet cables again.