This still feels like day one
Notes on staying curious. Why the first installation of Ubuntu at age ten still teaches more than most courses do at twenty-two.
I was ten when I installed Ubuntu 12.04. The instructions were on a forum, the disk image was on a flash drive borrowed from my father, and the partition table on our family computer was something I did not understand and was about to operate on anyway.
It worked. Not because I knew what I was doing; because the people who wrote that installer assumed someone like me would try, and they made the failure modes legible.
The tools changed. The pull didn’t.
That sentence is the only thing I still find true about my career.
The titles change. The stack changes. The companies change. The thing that doesn’t change is the small, slightly embarrassed feeling of being interested in how a system works, despite the fact that I am not yet qualified to ask the question.
So this is the rest of this site, and the rest of this writing: notes from someone who keeps starting over because that’s the only way I’ve found to keep starting at all.