Archive note: Originally published on paco.org on January 23, 2013. The prose was rehabilitated during the 2026 editorial review and is preserved here as technology-career writing; the original paco.org URL remains as a continuity redirect.

In the summer of 1983, when I was 14, I got my first job. Two classmates and I were hired by the school district for two months to build what I now know to call a database.

The district had only a few computer terminals and a printer that seemed bigger than my mother’s car. A couple of years later, my second job also involved writing and maintaining a database. Then college took me in another direction. I went into journalism and, for a long time, stopped writing software for pay.

Programming crept back in through the web. Building websites made it useful again, and eventually I enrolled at the local community college to put formal training around work I had been teaching myself and to fill in two decades of gaps.

In January 2013, the circle tightened further. I was about to sign a two-month contract with El Centro College to help finish an iPhone app that five students had built as a class project. The college liked their prototype and wanted to see it completed and submitted to Apple’s App Store. Two of us from the original class would finish the job.

Thirty years after that first summer database, I was being paid to program again.

The languages, machines, and distribution systems had changed completely. The underlying attraction had not: learn the system, make something useful, and keep learning whatever the next version requires.

Originally published January 23, 2013. Revised in 2026 to clarify chronology while preserving the career-origin story.

Related: Twenty-thirteen — an earlier memory of learning to investigate a computer system.