Have you ever truly thought you were living the wrong life.

I felt that way when I was growing up in rural North Florida with everyone — including much of my own family — telling me how worthless, weak and terrible I was.

I thought, there must have been some mistake. And there was. I was born in the wrong place, among ignorant losers who hated anything intellectual and anyone with more than half a brain. Luckily, I had a big ego and am more stubborn than a herd of rhinoceroses.

So I escaped, made my own life, and prospered. But those were rough years. I’m frankly glad nearly all of those people are dead now.

Something I have long believed is that being thin is in large part based on not really enjoying food pic.twitter.com/2RgQRjvrow

— Misha, Photographer, Eligible Bachelor (@drethelin) January 2, 2025

I fucking love food. I could eat a whole large pizza, easy. And did back in the day. But I do not now.

I am thin because I willed it. No other reason.

I’m in the pedal to the metal phase of the project I am doing alone at work that would normally be undertaken by 8-10 people for a company of this size.

At another company I worked for (which was larger, but not enormously larger) we had 12-15 consultants going full-time on the same project for 18 months. And its cost was $1.5 million.

Not including my own salary, I’m doing it for less than $30,000 and in around six months. I’m a big bargain, in other words. We unicorns have shiny, resplendent coats and glorious horns. And we tend to be divas. But we also fuckin’ deliver.

Would 14 year old you be proud of who he became, why or why not?

Oh, for sure. My path at 14 looked like either death or prison, or that in the opposite order. My life was very terrible when I was 14, for a variety of reasons.

But now, I own my own place¹, have plenty of money, friends, and most importantly I have a loving, lovely and wonderful partner to spend my days with. And who tolerates my incessant punning, sometimes across 3-4 languages at once.

I fucking won at life and my 14-year-old self would both be surprised and could not wait to be out of that hell and to be here instead. But I’m here now, and I’m very grateful for it every day — and that my past self had the will and resilience to endure what I did. Many people tried to break me. None succeeded.

1. With my partner.

I think it’s pretty flattering when I show up on a call and someone says something like, “I see they’ve called in the big guns now.” Happened to me today in a troubleshooting meeting.

About eight people had been working on the issue since last week. I solved it in 15 minutes.

Big guns indeed.

I wrote a little GUI application to unlock a drive on the Mac. You can paste the password in and it gives a success party cat message if all goes well:

I think party cat is cute. Or if it doesn’t work:

It also displays the actual error message — or at least what the mount process returns.

I think it’s pretty cool and even though I hate programming, this was quite useful to me to have done.

No one does the reading.

I do the reading. A lot of it. And that’s why I often know more than so-called “experts” in a field. You can learn a hell of a lot if you put in some effort and have a halfway decent brain.

Woody Allen supposedly said something like, “70% of life is just showing up.” And that’s true in all areas. If you read a couple of textbooks in a field and the top dozen papers, you already know more than 99.99% of people in general and more than 50% of “experts” in that field.

Sad but true.

I get asked the same question. I did it by reading nearly every book in a medium-sized library over the course of a decade-and-a-half, and any other book anyone would give me or let me borrow. And then kept on reading after that.

I’ve probably read 15,000-20,000 books. At one point, I was reading 20-30 (full, adult) books a week. I did this for years. I’ve read seven books in a day.

It’s not possible for most, I know, but I did it.

Looking back at my paratrooper days and how buck fucking wild I was, it’s amazing I survived.

But I did. Here I am.

The Butterfly Effect: What’s the Smallest Choice That Changed Your Life Forever?

Messaged a woman many years ago on ICQ in the middle of the night about Linux, expecting just to nerd out about tech crap.

She’s now my partner and really fucking awesome I might add.

Super easy. It’s A.

Took me 12 seconds. No other answer is even remotely possible. I’d never want to be a lawyer, but I’d nuke the LSAT so hard I’d be accused of cheating (has happened to me a lot).

Here’s why I can demand the things I do at work: I walked into my current job after the other person running the place had been let go.

There was no documentation of any kind. The hosting company was shit-tier. Some important parts of the infra I didn’t even have log-ins for and had to break into them or rebuild them. Everything was designed with the sole goal of saving money with no other thought or consideration. If there was something that was 100x worse but 10% cheaper, that’s what was used. Also, my predecessor was negligent and attempted to do more than they actually understood how to do. And was not well-liked, to say the least.

Since they had already been canned I had zero training, as already mentioned no documentation, and no preparation. There was no one to ask anything substantive of and no one to help me get started. It was all me.

And I rocked it. Maybe one of 1,000 of people in my field could’ve done what I did while keeping the actual product up in an extremely fragile and insecure environment.

It was admittedly rough for a while but now the company is in a much better place (hosting-wise and more metaphorically).

So that’s why I can and do send snarky emails to recruiters. I can roll that way because I can do what I do.

In general, I’d probably advise against following my example.