From Passion to a Professional Career
Part 1: From Curiosity with Computers to Coding with Comfort
Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. And like air, no one should be denied it.
This is a small blog entry about my entry into my tech career. I have spent a lot of my tech career learning to create something from nothing and finding solutions to technical problems that benefit myself and others. It has been a rocky road and has had its ups and downs but there are moments in my career that have made pivotal changes in my career. This is a story of how I went from fixing computers to writing code and how I go to where I am today. I’m an avid fan of scratching my curiosity with computers or tech. I have learned in life (and not from the V from Vendetta film because I haven’t seen it yet) that Knowledge is vital to life. For one to adapt in the world you must learn to be like water, to learn to be still and adapt to your surroundings.
DOOM DOOM DOOM
My mom, a school teacher, was very firm about what was to be done during school days in my house growing up. On school days (mon-fri or any day me and my brothers had to go to school) going from fixing a windows ME computer to play Doom and Heretic 2 to building pc’s and becoming a certified IT professional. At 9 years old my house had a family computer which my mom only allowed us to use for school purposes or to gather information from “Ask Jeeves”. What she didn’t know is that the computer would be the start of a marriage between me and my career. My older brother would come home with new AOL disks which allowed us to go online after hearing (what I thought at first was annoying) the AOL dial up tone and watching the software in the cd run on our computer and grant ‘high speed” connections.
Garage Trapping
Middle school and High School are some of the most pivotal moments in a child’s life. During those days I spent most nights and every weekend either skateboarding, playing basketball, or trapping out of my garage. My older brother would bring old computers that he got from friends or buy different computer parts to build a custom built gaming pc and leave all the excess junk in the garage. Before they got throw out I would find ways to put the pieces together to build my own computer so I can keep one in my room and play games that were locked on my brothers computer because of his password. Once I started to understand that I can start a pc with a motherboard, hard drive, keyboard, monitor, processor, and ram and heard the sweet sound of a power supply firing up. I knew that I needed to focus more time on this and less on trying to kickflip a 3 step at my middle school on weekends.
#High School Gaming and Gathering Freshman year of high school was like stepping into a different world. Freshman, wherever they come from are malleable. I knew that even though I had my core group of guys that I still hang out with to this day, I was going to run into a huge amount of new people and I wanted to fit in. How does a young Haitian-American boy fit into a school full of gangsters and thugs who happen to be Haitian and don’t know anything about computers, skateboarding, or rock music? Where do I fit in?
Opportunities
I started to notice that everyone (in 2005-2006) had a cell phone and were texting their friends or significant others except me. I would spend every week trying to convince my mom why I needed a cell phone and why she should pay for it…and Thank you mom for finding a creative way to kick starting my motivational journey and influencing me to become a member of the computer club. My mom finally caved after the first few weeks of school and said “If you stay after school for the reading club or a club that you enjoy, I will have to buy you a phone so that I can call you and pick you up from the school.” As soon as those words left her mouth it came in one ear as words and came out the other ear screaming “OPPORTUNITY”.
Computer Club
I join the reading club, chess club, art club, and computer club. Spending 4 days a week after school would force my mom to get my a cool Metro PCS phone that I can text her with. Little did she know I was trying to get my own digital call list to talk to girls (which never happened freshman year). I quickly learned that the computer club was just a club that juniors and seniors would use to play video games on the projectors of the science building. Every monday I can leave 7th period and head to the science building and watch these cool guys kick ass in Halo and Call of Duty or smash bros. I was hooked!
Freshman walk home
Unfortunately my mom would forget to pick me up or drive past the school and call me to convince me to take the activity bus or find a friend to drive home. Stuck at school on Mondays with a new cell phone and some cool gamers who all lived in Boca Raton or Palm Beach Gardens (both too far from the general direction of my house) I had to find a way to stay and play games, or learn to play chess after school. I finally fit in with some cool people after school and new friends I can sit with at lunch but may have to stop showing up because of my lack of transportation. I would hear friends in class talk about how they couldn’t finish their homework because their computers were messed up or broken and again that cell phone conversation rang through my ears…in came discussions about computers not working and out came “OPPORTUNITY”. I talked to a few classmates who I knew lived in lake worth or went to my middle school (which is down the street from my home and in relative location of where these people lived) and created an Opportunities. If I can fix your computer, will your parents drive me home?
It worked! Every night after school that I spent in a club, I would walk through the streets of lake worth and find my friends addresses. I would gather enough information with the free internet at school and access to google on how to fix their issues, get to their house, and work on fixing those issues. It was fight or flight. If I couldn’t fix their computer I couldn’t make it home and would be stuck in the gritty and dangerous streets of lake worth. Putting myself in those kinds of situations allowed to to hone my craft and learn new ways to remember the issues I came across and troubleshoot them in a timely manner so that I can be in and out and on my way home before it got to dark out.
From being present in the room to President of the Club
Sophomore year of High School was rolling in and the seniors are gone, the juniors are now seniors of the computer club and are focused on college courses. The Tech club was fading and having a new school principal who wanted to whip things into shape and restructure all clubs in school wasn’t going to allow me to find a way to have my mom continue to pay for my cell phone bill. I needed to find a way to revitalize the computer club and keep it going. By this time I was only going to computer club meetings on monday nights. I talked to the new principal and asked him what hes looking for in clubs and he explained that he wants to walk in on every club on the first and last week of the month and make sure the members of the club are being educated.
I was shot down by a girl that week via text message that week after sending her a text saying “Every moment in life is a learning experience so why don’t we learn more about each other as a couple”. The same technology that I joined the Computer Club with was also the same technology that would influence the decision to change the club. I took that quote and mentally buried it into my eyelids. Over the next 3 months I grabbed every broken computer in my garage and every monitor, screen, or keyboard and brought it to school to create a learning experience for others.
I changed the name from the Computer club to the Tech club and would use the slogan “Every moment in life is a learning experience”. Students started to gather up more and more as I found ways to compare the motherboard to the spine of the computer, or the processor as the brains of the pc so that it would stick in their heads. My mom would help me build weekly lesson plans to help teach new members of the club every week and decided that since I was so focused on the club she would continue to pay for my phone bill.
Due to the lack of returning members or members who only came to talk about video games, we weren’t able to make enough noise in the school paper to have our own article or get a picture in the school yearbooks.
Everything in Linux is a file
For a short summer I worked in boca for a company that dealt with loans and taxes. It was brief and I was hired because the person interviewing me (Rodney) asked me if I knew what Linux was. I hard heard of it at the time and spun up some virtual machines to find out what it was all about but never really did a deep dive into it until later in my career. I was fired after being a glorified data entry clerk for 2 months because the position required that you have a bachelors degree and I slipped under the cracks until the end of summer. The small discussion about how everything in Linux is a file and how files can be manipulated to work as scripts or as configuration files landed me a summer job and taught me about how you can distribute money to people when they call is saying “ Its my money I need it now!”. This part of the story is small but the fact that the little knowledge got me a job is important to me.
Educated Entrepreneurs
At one point in my career I knew that being the “neighborhood pc repair guy” wasn’t going to be enough for me. I started to find a fascination for web design and they way the web works and wanted to be a piece of the puzzle that helps build the web. How does one shift from cleaning out viruses to writing code and building web pages? With money of course. Now a new college student feeling a familiar feeling of not knowing anyone and wanting to find ways to make money to pay for web design courses I needed to find my edge that made me stand out from others.
Kids in high school would talk about smoking weed and drugs that they discovered after school. Young adults in at the community college however, were more open and apparent about the drugs they were smoking or trying to stay focused in class. Walking through the parking lot every day you would smell traces of weed smoke from someone who wanted to relax before walking to a stressful class or a group of potheads who wanted to smoke out a car before playing pool in the student activity center. Drug dealers came in different shapes and sizes, from the hipster tattered shorts to the gold chains and fresh jordan sneakers. One thing they had in common was that they were able to sell a product they didn’t own or manufacture and make profit. They were street entrepreneurs and sales agents of the community. The freedom they had in making a sale (in some remote location where they don’t get caught), going to class, then choosing whether or not then wanted to work more and make more money fascinated me.
Whats your Passion
I sat down with a friend who was known for having the best
I knew a girl who was in school for business administration that would study after class at the same time on mondays, tuesdays, and wednesdays and would read from the books she was using about creating business models and finding ways to produce income in a way that would allow to me set retainers for people who wanted me to come back and check on their systems. During the years of 2009-2011 Windows 8 took over the market which lead to sales in clients who needed copies of windows 7 on their pc’s so they didn’t have to deal with the frustrations of tiles, tablets menu’s, and new gimmicks that came along windows 8.
The money came in so well I was able to pay for books and classes out of pocket the next semester. The money came, then the money went. Clients started complaining that their computers were prompting that “Windows has not yet been activated”. I soon realized that the keys I was using were keys for trial versions of windows 7 or malicious keys that would trigger a windows activation error during an automatic update. My choices were to either find a way to become a Microsoft partner and sell keys (the legitimate way to sell keys on the streets), or find a free alternative to give people that will keep them happy for the time being.
The Change over
Doing a quick google search I came across Ubuntu. A Debian based operating system that was free for people to download and use, free of licensing costs, and free for life. I spent months “cracking” windows operating systems to satisfy clients while I learned about how to use Ubuntu and other linux Distros. The overwhelming knowledge of Free and open source software lead me down a road of using BackTrak linux, hacking, and using free Apache tools to build web servers. Do I switch from the streets where my validity was diminishing because of my rep for being the kid who can hook you up with some software that may or may not work, or do I switch to become a cyber hacker like I saw in the movies (like sneakers and the Italian Job). Neither worked out well but I knew that Linux was my newfound passion and what I wanted to work with from now on.
Open Source and free tools
In 2010 I found myself in college with the idea that I can get through school and leave debt free if I could find a way to find free alternatives to Microsoft or Closed Source Projects that I normally have to pay for. I got tired of torrenting cracked copies and manipulation license keys. I had already committed to making the switch to Ubuntu Linux and needed to find the right tools to keeping me from doing normal tasks on my laptop.
During these days I was making some money helping my cousin, a graphics and web designer, by make flyers, resize images, and cropping photos together with Photoshop and other tools on my home pc. To keep what little money I was making I had to find some way to keep big projects on more than just a thumb drive and a quick solution to making quick changes on the go. Sounds like a lot for someone who only owned With just an hp G6 laptop, a chromebook, a broken honda cbr 600, and a bus pass at the time I needed to make sure I have an alternative in case photoshop stopped opening because of licensing errors or office started complaining about invalid keys.
I was looking for Open Source Alternatives that would help be save some coin, and with a stroke of luck, or genius,
I googled “Open Source Alternatives” and found OS ALT.
Now that i have a potential repository to find alternatives to common software I cant afford like Microsoft Office 2010 (at the time)
and Photoshop I would be set! In college many teachers stressed the importance of staying focused and not wasting time. However, during those micro lectures I would be thinking about ways to take down key notes and writing poems to make it look like I was being attentive. The professor stated
that people don’t take enough time to write out lists to accomplish goals they are setting for themselves…and that’s when it hit me.
I needed to write a list of software that I use on a day to day basis and software that I use that trigger me to turn on my computer
and use it for school or work related purposes. My list at the time consisted of the following
- Image editing like Photoshop
- Music players like Itunes
- Writing papers like Microsoft Word
- Torrent Downloader like Vuze
- Task organizer like Windows Sticky Notes
- Web browser for everything else.
After writing these notes down I approached the professor to gather insight on what he may use his computer for on a day to day basis. I figured he would say something that would trigger me to think of other reasons I use my computer other than Netflix and browsing the web. He said “Well I look for ways to play games and read news articles.”. In a school like setting random questions like this seemed to be the norm so I was comfortable with asking other people and telling them it was for a class. I realized that everyone Used their computer for just about the same reasons I used mine, give or take some Microsoft excel wizards and World of Warcraft fanboys.
Getting all the information I felt was necessary I think decided to give the project a name. Naming it would encourage me to continue with the project and not succumb to the convenience of the software already installed on my computer. Thus, the inception of Project Migration began. More on that in another blog.
The cost of doing business
For some reason (unknown to me at the time) I didn’t want to lose my street cred so I focused on finding out which version of Linux has the most support and is the easiest to transition to from Windows. This kind of thinking had me believe that I can get people to use software like Firefox on Ubuntu and whatever software they had there as alternatives to get basic work done and call me when they needed help installing something new. If i’m special skills I would be the new Frank Lucas on the block (just not as good looking as a young denzel). I read through sites like Distro Watch and Linux Journal to learn about anything and everything I could to show people how to use Apache Open Office instead of Microsoft Office so they can finish school assignments or spreadsheets for free. I quickly learned that consumers will stick to what they know due to comparability and fear of what they don’t know
Time felt as though it was running against me and local clients were going to other people like young family members to fix computers. I was lowering prices to stay afloat and make sure client retention met a status quo but the streets were flooded with new kids on the block with dvd’s of all types of software that can hook you up for cheaper than my prices. I could either rebrand myself and start a business so that people would take me more seriously with an LLC to compete with best buys geek squad and lil Timmy who just turned 12 and already helps mom with installing apps on her phone…. or go back to understanding what I was doing everything for. Web Design! I went to vistaprint after hearing about a coupon code on the radio or youtube somewhere and got a batch of business cards for free and labeled myself a web designer and developer. Instead of convincing adults that they should break from the norm and switch to free software I figured I would use this newfound knowledge to free myself from my past self. “Knowledge is Freedom”.
Family and Failure
Working in restaurants to pay for school and bills was fun, but I wanted to take the computer hustle to a new level and rebranding myself had its ups and downs. I was always inspired by my cousin who has been a self made dj, web developer, and entrepreneur but watching him grind day in and day out was intimidating and stressful. I knew that I would want to take that same energy and focus it in a way that would allow me to have weekends off or take a vacation that might include responding to emails or leaving the house without having to do so much leg work. I was about 22 at the time and as young and naive to this new world of social media and life, I didn’t focus enough attention on learning new skills at the time or building full web applications to learn how different things connected. Instead I found that wordpress run 30% of the internet and has documentation and plugins for just about anything on the web. I focused my attention on building wordpress sites and learning more about how I can setup my own page with wordpress and how I can use that knowledge to monetize and make money.
The glorified IT guy
Now equipped with my knowledge in Linux, windows, Wordpress, and server technology I had a firm understanding that stack overflow, Quora and Google are double edged swords that may either help or overwhelm me. All this information was great and allowed me to show off my skills here and there but I didn’t have an audience and West Palm Beach Florida wasn’t Silicon Valley or New York in terms of tech conferences or startup hubs. I knew that if I wanted to get noticed I would have to start from the ground up and work my way through the ranks to not only find my dream career but to learn as I go. The enc1102 classes I took in school helped me bang out 2,000 word essays on things that no one cared about in no time, but didn’t help me with getting a job in tech, so I had to step out of my comfort zone and start applying for those kinds of jobs. I applied at a local Best Buy and with persistence and a passion for technology one of the managers fell in love with me and got me an interview. During the interview process I was told I would be working with Geek Squad. This is it! …and then it wasn’t. The manager that was supposed to interview me for Geek Squad had left 10 minutes early so the Computer Sales manager did the interview instead and “stole” me thinking that I would fit in and make big sales. After the training in sales I knew two things. I hated sales and didn’t want to sell $200 printers to grandmas who want to print 1 picture of their grandchildren and possibly never use the printer again, and two, that this will look good on my resume and I should be grateful. I soon found ways to be honest and sell the right products to the right people by studying sales techniques on youtube and being honest to myself and to customers. If customer A was going to buy her nephew a laptop because hes going away to college and her nephew isnt a gamer and will most likely use it for porn, netflix, and school work, then she wont need the newest $1,200 hp ultrabook with $300 of best buy and geek squad support (which I felt was nonsense but I wont go there). I soon ran into a guy who stated he was looking for a new laptop cuz his son spilled milk all over the keyboard and he didn’t know if there were milk stains on the laptop or something else. I convinced him to not go with the fancy looking laptop that he was looking to throw money at, but to instead look for a cheaper laptop that has beats audio integrated into it so he can have better quality sound when watching his “movies” and he mentioned out loud and could spend some money on amazon looking for protective cases since best buys cases were over priced. Needless to save my honesty didn’t make me good friends with my manager but everyone else I worked with had no qualms with me. The guy liked my honesty so much he threw me an offer to get me a job in tech support cleaning viruses and told me “ Your talents are being wasted here in Best buy”. After looking at his card for a few nights and thinking that I should call this guy I met with a guy who came into the store just before closing and talked my head of about how he used to work for Dell back in the day and how his son is a computer whiz. At the time I didn’t know that his son would end up being my manager or that we would learn a lot from each other but his son told me about a job that was hiring in the Delray beach area and have me a name and number. The numbers just happened to match the previous customer and I knew it had to be a sign. I called the number and got an interview from Alex Miller the next week. My first step int o the tech support world.
OMG Tech Help and support
Still the IT GUY
The warning signs came in daily with how much fun and how crazy the wild west of tech support can be. I was born in Brooklyn but lived in West Palm Beach my whole life but didn’t know that Delray Beach florida is considered the drug rehab capital of America, until I started working for a tech support company. Working for two months in this new work environment where there were no real dress code standards and you were allowed to work with a T-shirt and jeans felt like I was living in a dream! The power went out a few times, there was extra pizza in the breakroom because the sales team were killing it with numbers, there were chefs coming by once a week with gourmet meals for dinner….life couldn’t have seemed better. I walked into Marky Mark’s office (my manager at the time) after being called into it and was told that I could become a supervisor if I wanted the position. I was ecstatic of course because I could then take the knowledge I knew and was sharing with the people sitting to the left and right of me and share it with everyone now. The money in the promotion and the salaried position also allowed me to buy my second motorcycle and start paying off some bills as well. My first day as a supervisor I was told to go into the bathroom and make sure so and so was okay. I walked in and found a guy sitting on a toilet with a needle in his arm and thats when it hit me. Walking out of the bathroom felt like walking into Narnia. The glow and glamour of working in tech and answering calls to remove viruses with comrades was gone. I was walking into a business that hired people with no background checks, threw people on the phones that knew nothing about computers, and got sales guys and girls to talk their grandma’s into high end deals with white labeled antivirus that only worked half the time. I didn’t know what to think at the time but I was working with a girlfriend who was in the customer support deparment and decided to sit outside and talk to her. She assured me that she was well aware of the ratchet people we worked with and started showing me articles about how Delray Beach was known as the “Rehab capital of America” and then pointed out a bus that was in the parking lot that drove some co-workers to halfway houses where they lived. 40% of the tech department had criminal charges for being young and reckless, the other 40% were all classmates from Florida career college and applied at this job because it was at a job fair, the rest of them were older people with kids and child support to deal with and needed a job that was easy and didnt require much work.
I didn’t want to get comfortable and wanted to use my power as a supervisor to try to help everyone grow as people in the tech field. The range between the people in that place spanned from new to the field to a decade of tech support experience. I loved the people around me and the conversations we had so I made it my mission to get the company to pay for a few cheap tech related certifications like entry level Microsoft Technical Associate certs. During these few weeks that I would bring up fun ideas my girlfriend was getting involved in some arguments with her manager and ended up leaving (or getting fired, (that I dont remember). At the time I was off work on thursdays and fridays. She got fired on thursday and had a new job on friday at a new tech support place that was cleaner and did background checks.. I was so excited for her and sad at the same time because we wont be able to eat dinner together anymore. That friday I stayed home and played video games with friends like any normal day. Saturday morning I walked in and was escorted to the owners office and was told that I was getting fired for slandering the companies name and showing up on my day off to talk to other people about leaving the company and join my girlfriends new rival place of employment.
The calm before the storm
Before I was able to demand footage on security cameras that they said they had I looked at my phone and saw that my gmail for business accounts were having sync issues and knew they had already made their decision. I remembered that this wasnt the end and even though I was living paycheck to paycheck something about leaving the company felt calming. I stopped the HR manager as she was giving me the runaround with how much the company loved me and how my ideas for getting techs certified was a great idea and told her it was a pleasure working there and I will leave quietly. It was my first time getting fired, leaving a job in that caliber. months later friends called me in a frantic talking about how cops broke into the building and shut down computers. People were being searched and lined up on the wall and sheriffs had full on vests and loaded firearms. (https://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/delray-tech-support-firms-settle-scam-allegations-for-million/g2QGoihKuwox8aVmTzOjGO/) The company was shut down because of fradulant acts. There was discussion about how Elliot Lower
My girlfriend got me a job at her new tech support company which felt like a better place because it was cleaner, the owners of the company were younger and were in a band called Nebraska Bricks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_sUOZpJsfk).
Stability the Hello World project
Knowing what I knew and feeling lost after abruptly leaving and starting a new tech job and not reflecting on it…I decided to reflect on it. I no longer wanted to be disposable or end up getting fired because of my significant other. I wanted to make a name for myself and find a way to be needed in a way that would get me off random phone calls with angry people and viruses, and into an office where I had some kind of stability. After talking to supervisors about ways to be more involved there was discussion about the need for a tool that can be run and installed on on client computers that is lightweight and wouldn’t require us to use big zip files that took too long to transfer to computers with bad internet connection, and bingo!. At this time the world had become a Barack Obama driven “Learn to Code” society where there were new platforms online that would teach you to write code and build Hello World apps. I thought that it would be easy to create a small windows based application that could be run with visual basic that would clean out temp files, scan for system information, and provide feedback on drivers and serial numbers on the laptops, or desktops that the app was being run on, and easy enough to remove from a computer. Visual Basic was my programming language of choice because Microsoft had documentation for years on visual basic and c# applications and how to create buttons and download links with a button and gui. I ended up creating the TechToolkit and used Github to host and save the code. Being able to rely on documentation and use open source software like github to keep my code in an area that allowed me to write code, test code, then download and run it without much worry. Open source software for the win! The VB Techtoolkit went through quite a few changes during that time but the remains of it can be found on github (https://github.com/tmeralus/VB-TechToolkit).
Friend or Foe 98
When co-workers started beta testing the toolkit on client machines I started doing more research on how to package and sell the product and how small companies support and sell software. The owners of the company were on tour every other week making it harder and harder for them to sit down together and allow me to have one of those movie like business meetings where i try to sell them on this great product and idea. The HR rep and technical director Ryan at the time was not a critical part of the team and liked the app so far. That gave me enough hope to continue adding new features to it with stock free photos while trying to work within the dependencies constraints of dotnet framework 3.5 at the time (if my mind is as sharp as i think it is). Being a solo maintainer and working alone became a bit of a problem so I decided to start sharing the code to others at work. A few weeks went by and people starting asking me about why I removed certain download links and replaced them with other applications. I soon realized that someone in the office was rewriting my project and pushing it off as their own. That someone….Josh, was a supervisor and was able to send out mass emails forcing people to use his toolkit over mine because it was faster. “I swear I saw a light bulb when I finally figured out who was the culprit I said yeah, remember me from Friend or Foe when I told you don’t ever ever come around here no more Time to pay now, he tried to rise, I wave the gun - lay down This time you’re really going to listen to Jay now” –Jay Z
I confronted him like a New York cat would ya know, tried to see what was going on. He explained to me that he heard of an opportunity to make more money in the game by coming up with something that all the techs could use to help remove viruses and fix computers faster. With a newfound rival my head began to spin on rushing to get everything done with the toolkit or rewriting the entire thing in C# so it wouldn’t be dependent on dotnet frameworks and would work better than anyone else in the office. In the end the time spent on writing code and building applications, along with the knowledge of what can happen when yo have some friendly competition was more than enough for me to know that I was never going back to working in restaurants. To this day we remain friends on social media and laugh about it but back then I didn’t know who to trust and walked around trying to find out who was friend or foe.
The Rebrand
I knew at that time I needed to re-brand myself. I had went from neighborhood computer kid, to Team Lead Tier 3 tech support rep, to wanna be developer. I wanted to market myself in a space that would allow me to secure my future in the tech industry and help people who find me online know that I not only have a passion for what I do but I mean business. To do that I knew I couldn’t work for anymore tech support companies. My mom who had been a teacher for over a decade had told me about working in the school district, the hours were nice, the holidays off and free time off work would allow me to continue trying to build apps and make some money on the side while getting that government bread.
UPDATES TO THIS STORY COMING SOON
So far this story has only gone from 2009 - 2014. This is the first part of my passionate to profession story that I have been writing. I’m hoping that it sheds some light on my fun filled career and allows my daughter to read this in the future to get a better understanding of who her dad was as he was growing in his 20’s. I also hope that whoever reads this finds this interesting as well.
A list of new things to discuss in part 2 and other parts of this story are below. If you would like to rush me to write more feel free to message me on Twitter at @techgameteddy
- working for the school district - RES
- working with the water people - GGP
- How comfortable is too comfortable - GGP
- My First Hackathon - Palm Beach Tech Space
- Networking and Not working -Jr Palm Beach Fishing
- Small IT building, Big Problems, Bigger Dreams
- Takinng a leap of faith in Philly
- Certification and Street Creds
- Social Media and Social Distractions
- Patience, People, and #BlackTechTwitter
- The sailor that keeps on sailing