This blog post represents the beginning of yet another career transition. The most amazing part is that I have enough experience to blog about IT in the first place. I’m sure you guessed this was going to be about something tech-related.

I actually spent 24 years working in kitchens. Everything from fast food to four-star dining. Then my son was born, and working in a kitchen wasn’t going to pay for the kind of life I wanted to provide for him. But! I had this skill that until then was just a hobby. Building computers. But it wasn’t that simple.

I started out in IT when I was 17, and not through an educational system like most of you. I was just one of those kids that had to take everything apart and see if I could put it back together (working). When I was 17, some of the guys I hung out with were into gaming and computers.

When a group of them were around I would ask a lot of questions. One day, my buddy James handed me a box full of spare computer parts. He even threw in the full set of DOS floppies. We’re talking original AT motherboards, none of that ATX stuff. Set your own jumpers, all of it. Not even a case, just boards and cords, hooked up, and a dialup modem screaming at the top of its lungs. That’s where it all started.

I’m in my twenties at this point and trying to turn this hobby into a future for my son.

The First Obstacle

The first obstacle in pursuing this path I was already on, kind of, was that companies like Best Buy had come along and turned $35 an hour work into a $10 an hour job when they started offering to send 19-year-olds to your house to fix grandma’s computer. I was already doing better than that. What else could I do?

I had started learning more about software at an ATM company I was doing hardware work for. I thought about it for a while and figured I would try my hand at building websites. I felt good about this because it was 2007 and Google provided a lot of results that made me think I could do this.

When It Becomes Work

I continued to toil away in kitchens for another seven years before I turned my DIY computer education into checks for the rent and electric bill. Here is where I toss you for another loop and switch career field on you again. I was making money from doing SEO work, which I resisted for years previous because of the prevalence of low-lives ripping off small business owners.

So here I am, from kitchen to hardware, to web design, then on to SEO. The technical term is Web Presence Management. The cool part is that I get to tap all of my skills every day by what I know and need to know to pull this off.

However, as you become better at IT today that means automation, like WordPress, niche hosting so I don’t have to babysit a server, etc. Without all the time-saving software I wouldn’t make very much money at this but the side effect is that it’s just a job and you become separated from what you love about the technology.

Full Circle

After a few years of working with small businesses, getting better at the spectrum of skills I’ve learned, and a sociopolitical movement around privacy, I’m working on some of my own software to address the consumer demand for privacy while making a few dollars and giving back to the open-source community that fed me. By fed me I mean trolled me on forums and told me how awful my work was until I could build a website that didn’t look like a pile of HTML on the floor.

Now that I am writing code again, which I found a passion for early on, I am leaving the Web Presence Management business with the love of my life who has a passion for creative writing and design. Now I will have free time to write blog posts like this and play with the new computer hardware that has progressed a lot while I’ve been busy becoming a grownup.