# My Story DRAFT - Graduated 2012 with one (productive*) interest in the world: Chinese Language. - Applied for two scholarships: China and Taiwan - Got Scholarship to come to Taiwan and study for a year - Got a (partial) scholarship to study at Middleburry for a summer - Studied at middleburry the summer of 2012 - Amazing. To this day it's the most Chinese I've learned per time spent. Two months of intense study and I was ready for Taiwan. Outstanding program. - Studied 中文 in TW for a year (2012 - 2013) - Loved it, learned a lot. - Rate of learning was lower than Middleburry, but more realistic. - after a year in TW I had _mostly_ stopped speaking like a textbook (too formal) or a mainlander (different accent) - Met Nick at a CouchSurfing meet up, he gave me a roadmap to learn programming - Followed his roadmap, learned Wordpress and jQuery, congratulated myself on achieving the pinnacle of software engineering - Used wordpress to get jobs through online job boards - Developed a stream of income, became a freelancer - faked it 'til I made it. Sold clients work I didn't know how to complete, but knew I could figure out how to complete - Spend hundreds of hours completing tens of hours of paid work (The experience was the real compensation) - Nick asked if I wanted to start a company together. Hell yes - Should ask nick what he thought at the time. Looking back I was clearly not technical enough to CTO a project like Pxify (later Vectr). - I of course didn't know I was not technical enough. I had been faking it until I made it for at least a year and was getting paid real money. I had made it—how much harder could cloning Illustrator in a web browser be*? - We went through an Indian accelerator named GSF (right?), they took us on a startup field trip from india to SF - While in SF, after some months not getting much done on Pxify it became clear I was not the CTO to carry the project through to completion - Nick and I parted ways amicably (still friends today) - Continued doing client work. Had a steady client in the form of Sidebench. Built more stuff, learned more tech. - Staid in the US for a few months after parting with Nick but eventually returned to TW, without direction - Growing awareness that I was in fact _not_ the prototypal software engineer - Moved* back to the US to become a "real" software engineer. Learn the trade - Three months into 2015 i had 2 offers (yelp, trustar) - Choose less money, smaller company because I felt I'd have more growth opportunity - Met my current cofounder, Sean, who was my coworker in SF - Three and a half years of startup life in SF - Learned a ton. I cannot overstate this. If my goal in going to SF was to improve as a software engineer, I succeeded.* - Took a year off - Did some traveling (Shanghai, Bangkok) - Did not touch a terminal for months - Overcame the technical burnout, got hungry for technical projects again - Built MVP for a friend's crowdfunding business ([fansi.me](https://fansi.me/)) - Co-founded a company to teach people programming online ([pairwise.tech](https://pairwise.tech/)) - Very different than my last attempt at founding. - Much easier problem space technically speaking* - I'm a much better engineer than I was - Sean and I both teach from experience. We learned on our own*, without formal computer science training. - Started a podcast - We're all caught up now. I wanted to record my story for use in a podcast ep, so I wrote this doc to help jostle my memory into the shape of a narrative.