I am a proud, card-carrying member of the Oregon Trail generation, aka the “Xennials.” Navigating the freshly forged trails from the analog world into the digital, my formative years were a heady mix of floppy disks, batch files, and wide-eyed wonder. I was fortunate to grow up in a school system that was embracing the advent of the personal computer. When the elementary school got a batch of Commodore PET PCs I begged to go play with them at each opportunity. They were way more interesting to me than crayons or clay.
I was a voracious learner as a child. I had a habit of devouring all the coursework teachers could give me and asking for more to consume or to be allowed to go down to the library where I pored over any reference text or non-fiction I could get my hands on. During these enjoyable moments of exile, I discovered that the library had an Apple iiC that it didn’t seem anyone knew what to do with. I dug out the manual from a drawer, taught myself a few tricks on that monochrome marvel, and I was hooked.
Eventually I annoyed the librarians enough that they sent me to the junior high next door, where, hiding in the corner of the enrichment classroom, I discovered an Apple IIGS which meant COLOR and SOUND!! I was a kid in a candy store. Between my adventures on the Oregon Trail and solving the latest Carmen Sandiego whodunits, I plowed through a BASIC programming manual the best I could as a young child without the benefit of an LLM, Stack Overflow, or an adult who knew anything about it.
I eventually managed to write my first program: a mischievous infinite loop that filled the screen with words I would not have been allowed to say in class. The adults weren’t sure how to stop the program from running on this newfangled contraption, so I was allowed to persist in my endeavors with just a mild admonishment to watch my language … as long as I shut the program down. A hacker was born.
As I grew into an awkward adolescent, my love for computers and all the things they made possible flourished. I was the resident expert on how to use our household PC when we finally got one. Most of my free time was spent messing with the newest version of DOS, eating up the family phone line with my Telnet BBS, and eventually ranting and raving about this new fantastical thing called the World Wide Web.
By the time I was finishing High School, my geek flag was flying high. I had taken almost every STEM class available. As I looked towards college, despite my love for working with computers, I just saw them as a tool to accomplish solving problems in some other domain. I never saw working with computers as something I could pursue directly as a career. Computers were still novel enough to my guidance counselors and teachers that not one, to my recollection, ever thought to suggest a career in computing to me. Instead, I explored law, chemistry, biology, physics, and robotics. I ultimately ended up starting college pre-med.
In a plot twist, I was seduced by the siren song of a very different world - the theatre. Near the end of my high school career, some friends pulled me into our drama club. Barely into the first meeting, I knew that I had no interest in performing and assumed that meant the theatre was probably not for me. Wandering the backstage hallways, I ran into a friend I knew from my science classes and asked what he was doing there. His response? “Trying to figure out how best to make a life-size cow that can roll on stage on its back and then spray milk.” That broke my brain in the best way.
I had thrived as a student who was good at knowing the answers and picking up new material in my STEM classes, but here I was facing a problem like nothing in my memory banks. Before I could even contemplate why one would need to figure out such a ridiculous task, my brain was locked off on how one might do that. I had just wandered into the magical and challenging world of technical theatre.
The immense breadth of material in dramatic literature and the technical challenges posed by trying to make those worlds into a reality provided a newfound stimulation and excitement. I felt challenged in both hemispheres of my brain in ways I had not in a long time, if ever, and I just wanted more. Pre-med only lasted a semester in college before I changed my major and pursued a life hiding in the shadows, wiring up gadgets and programming consoles to shoot photons at performers. I even made some side hustle money building portfolio websites for my fellow theatre majors and their fledgling companies.
Eventually I earned two degrees in technical theatre and enjoyed a career that took me all over the country crafting creative solutions to uncommon problems in varied environments, typically with rigid deadlines and tight budgets. I was fortunate to have many great mentors who nourished the fearless joy of saying “I have no idea how to do that, but I’ll figure it out.” I worked in a multitude of areas within entertainment technology including carpentry, painting, metalwork, electronics, sound design, and video projection. My primary focus was lighting design, and the industry had just gone digital for lighting control as I was coming of age in the field - which meant new technical toys to play with. I also spent time in higher education teaching lighting and sound design and technical production systems to university students for many years.
While I loved my life in the theatre and the family I built there, a life on the road in the entertainment industry has its challenges. Like many fields, the pandemic of 2020 added immensely to these challenges. In addition to trying to figure out how to survive as a company, those of us in production leadership were also now tasked with playing health and safety coordinator and emergency response manager in unprecedented ways with even tighter resources, limited information, and unclear paths forward.
We managed to weather the storm for the most part, but as we returned to live productions, I realized something had changed in me. I decided that my 20 years or so of producing live theatre had been enough. The live performance world I knew from before had been irrevocably changed and rather than recalibrate, I decided it was time for something new.
As a theatrical designer and technician, I was always computing-heavy: writing scripts to automate processes, programming complex lighting and sound effects on proprietary hardware, syncing interactive environments to the millisecond with timecoding, collecting environmental input from physical sensors and microcontrollers, and building interactive applications in ecosystems like PureData and Max/MSP.
As a professor in university theatre departments that were often underfunded and overextended, we rarely had the necessary technical resources available to us at a scale that could meet the highly specialized systems used in entertainment technology. Necessity being the mother of invention, I learned how to maintain the hardware and infrastructure as well - working on moving light fixtures, control consoles, serial control protocols, TCP/IP networks, wireless communications, and distributed systems.
Here I was, a seasoned adult and professional, equipped with a more evolved understanding of the possibilities of a career built around computers and technology than I had as a child, but still fueled by the same curiosity and wonder I had back then. Building on the proliferation of the web and digital technology into our daily lives, I found myself drawn to the idea of ‘re-discovering’ computing and tech in new ways in my life. Armed with a lifetime in tech and creative problem solving, and more nerdy nostalgia than you can shake a SCSI cable at, I charted a course toward the next career steps in my life and set my sights on full time software development.
The first thing I wanted to assess was the delta between skills I currently had and those needed for professional software developers. I did informal research, talking to people in the field, reading job descriptions, resumes, blogs, and social media profiles to extract the core technical skills, business workflows, and a deeper understanding of software lifecycles.
I was also translating my professional experience as a production manager and designer into laying out a plan and managing its implementation as if this next phase was a production coming to life. I made schedules with milestones and deadlines, drew up budgets for devoting time and money to study, and started to craft the narrative for this upcoming sequel.
I considered three main paths - another degree, a bootcamp, or self-directed study. Having recently exited a career in academia I was not particularly anxious to return to that environment. I also ran into requirements for remedial coursework that seemed burdensome and costly in many cases, without a lot of payoff for my situation. I determined that most of the skills I needed to level up were not being taught in bootcamps, and the vast majority of bootcamp curricula that I researched seemed to be highly introductory given my previous experience. In evaluating the pros and cons of directing my own path, I identified two significant potential shortcomings - a lack of accountability mechanisms, and a lack of a cohort that would be more inherent in a degree program or bootcamp.
To address the accountability issue, I leaned on my time as an educator for curriculum structure and my time as a production manager for resource management. I broke down the topics I needed to explore and arranged them into logical groupings and progressions. I reverse engineered the time allotted to each topic based on the relative priority I assigned and the correlating percentage of my total time available. I laid out a high level calendar. I set up spreadsheets and used a time tracking app to do weekly check-ins with myself where I reviewed where my attention had gone and how my skills and knowledge had progressed. Following each weekly assessment I would recalibrate both topic structure and prioritization as needed.
Building on a desire for accountability that wasn’t reliant solely on self-discipline, I looked for ways to share my journey and expand my professional network in tech, taking advantage of any opportunity I could find to share my work, my curiosities and confusions, and get direction and guidance. I engaged with the Techlahoma community, participating in online discussions and user group meetups and eventually taking on a role as organizer of the Tulsa Web Devs user group.
It was through these networking efforts that I was exposed to the Recurse Center where I spent three intensely stimulating months with incredibly smart, kind, and curious people exploring whatever made our brains hurt in a good way. The entire program was self-directed by the cohort with the aim of forcing us to flex our volitional muscles and work at the edge of our abilities. It opened my eyes to just how broad and deep the possibilities in tech were and how much exploring I still had to do in front of me.
After finishing my batch at the Recurse Center, I started seeking employment as a developer. I experienced the gamut of hiring processes that are dizzyingly varied in tech, trying to figure out how to best explain to potential employers and colleagues who I was – both a new face and an old hand at the same time.
Thanks to the networking I had done earlier, I was invited to interview at Clevyr. It didn’t take me long to see that Clevyr has a healthy dose of that same secret sauce that drew me to the Recurse Center and to the world of technical theatre: a team of passionately curious, relentlessly collaborative individuals who treat each other with respect and kindness, teaming up to solve problems that matter, day in and day out.
Every day, I try to bring a steady dose of that same fearless creativity and collaborative inventiveness to the work I do. Careers don’t always move in straight lines. Sometimes they meander through backstage hallways and mind-bending call stacks–but every twist adds to your toolkit. Whether you’re debugging a DMX universe or a web app, curiosity is your best compass.
Ford the rivers friends! (Just watch out for dysentery.)
At Clevyr, our life’s work is to put our curiosity and passion to work for our clients, bringing your vision into software reality. If you’d like to work with Erich and our Clevyr team (including a maybe surprising number of second-actors) give us a call at 1.844.425.3897 or contact us.