Since my last post, I started working at a startup that promptly shut down five days later. I was then contacted by an ex-coworker from my original company — in fact, the very same one who emailed me in January, telling my to come to Boston to interview. That email changed my entire life. His new email to me was less transformative, but similar in content. Basically, I’m working with him (and about five others from that job) once again at a new startup.

I’ve worked at three startups this year.

I’ve worked at three startups this year.

If you could go back in time and tell myself from January 1st that’s what would end up happening, and that I’d be living in Boston, basically on my own, do you know what I would do? I’d either call you crazy, or hide in my room. It still startles me when I realize all that I’ve done on my own this year. I’ve never thought of myself as being able to… well, live as an adult. I thought that sometime, in the far off future, I’d somehow grow into a mature adult. But never the immediate future.

When I was an early teen, that was true. But it was less and less true as I aged and eventually became a legal adult. That still didn’t change my thinking. I put up all these cushy barriers that let me ignore the fact that as an adult, I should be living on my own and doing my own work. I told myself I’d only have to worry after four years of college and maybe a full year “buffer” of applying to places. If you’re keeping count, I thought that I’d only have to “become” adult-like when I hit 23 years old at the earliest.

You know what else scares me? My programming skills, oddly enough. I’m not even a great hacker, but I realized when I was staring at some work code the other day that… I understood it. I didn’t know 100% of the codebase and JavaScript maybe has some calls I don’t know about, but knowing those kinds of things is “data” knowledge, not “processing knowledge.” (Think hard drive versus CPU.) I understood the program flow and how things worked, even if I didn’t understand a couple of the underlying methods. The Chrome Dev Tools’ console filled up with log statements, and I could understand it all.

It’s like when you first watched The Matrix and you asked, “How the hell does the Operator understand all that vertical green code?” And that was me with web development. But today, I’m the Operator. I’ve looked inside the black box and figured out its inner workings.

This is all to say, yes, I’m scared a little. Of the person I’m becoming, if I’ll be completely different from who I used to be. That is what I never want to happen, I’ve always viewed consistency as a mark of intellectual strength. If you like some kind of music as a kid you’d be made fun of by your adult peers for, what shows more courage? Standing up and saying you still like it, or caving and renouncing your childhood as “you didn’t know what you were doing?”

While I’m scared of all that, I’m also excited. Really excited. Excited enough to think of the future, when I’m running my own thing. And I know now that eventually, I’ll get there. I don’t have to learn everything today, because I can count on myself learning everything I need to and more on the path there.

Each day is one step further towards that day.
-Andrew