Why would my teenage years of yore matter to you?
Well… this is less a CV account than a reflection: when recently considering shaping forces in my life I found that I could trace interesting continuities far back.
Most notably a persistent zest for learning, hands-on discovery, and entrepreneurial doing.
I also realised how early I had already – unknowingly back then – touched themes that went mainstream only much later: digital design, digital transformation, agility, new work just to name a few.
I learned about system compatibility the hard way – by discovering that none of the software on my mates' and my school's computers ran on the first of my own (a tiny Commodore C116: 16k RAM, rubber keys, flickering tv screen, cassette tape drive – but amazing 116 colours for graphics that had compelled me). Neither would the reader-contributed code listings printed in the computer mags of that time.
Hence I had to DIY – all from zero. After quite a bit of trial-and-lots-of-error experimentation I got my hands on a freshly published programming manual for my machine at last. Then I scratched my own itch with my first fully functional digital product ever: a bitmap font editor written in Basic and Assembler.
My best nerd friend helped a bit with the trickier code. In the end I could display all available characters, navigate and select them for editing in a zoomed 8x8 pixel matrix, draw/erase pixels, shift the whole matrix in all directions, invert the character bitmap, save a font to tape and load it back. With that I designed numerous creative fonts that adorned exclusively my flickering screen in various programmed ways. The <blink> tag of later years and Comic Sans would probably both have been proud. ;)
Nothing of that remained: roughly a year later I soldered my machine to premature death: a failed impulsive learning-by-doing attempt at expanding its memory – software is more forgiving. Another lesson.
Over a decade later digital interaction design would slowly become a thing in the world.
My dad had started the slightly annoying habit of enabling me to earn money of my own rather than providing me with pocket money. Mostly by pitching me as a computer expert to people in his network. A bit awkward to me: I knew enough people far more capable than myself and would have considered myself as somewhat competent but far from expert. Yet, when the average competence in the environment is close to zero, anyone above that baseline involuntarily sells as one ;) So did I. A zest for learning might have helped a bit. Shortly after working as a babysitter for one of my parent's friends, a clinical physician and medical professor, I also started hunting down and fixing bugs in the homegrown patient information system on his PC (initially the work of a student of his IIRC). Voilà: my first contact with early stage digital health ;)
Along the same line arrived the first official freelance client of my life: another family friend, an executive, had a severe problem: a senior financial controller in his company had left. And with him the entire knowledge about the elaborate Excel files that contained all the company's important financial data and accounting system. Documentation: none.
Having often helped him with his first PC already years ago as a kid he offered me an opportunity: understand what's going on in these Excel files – and write a brief manual for it. I just had to bill the company officially. Why yes, sure! My only problem was that I had no clue what he was talking about: WTF is ‘financial controlling’? Neither had I ever used Excel before that. No internet to inquire quickly then, mind you. I ended up learning a lot from scratch, fast. And… delivered. :-)
The job paid my summer holidays, a synthesizer, and recording equipment – by far my biggest renumeration for years to come. The accidental knowledge acquired on the fly might have been even more valuable: business administration 101 – accounting & reporting. And I authored my first piece of technical writing for non-technical users. (Quality-wise probably as cringeworthy as any newbie work – yet it did the job and made the client happy.)
Roughly around the same time I played the first concert with a band that you don't need to know. Suffice to say we were excruciating noisy, grinding dissonant, blazing loud, preposterously artsy, and – the last to play that night – drunk as fuck. Someone told me that the hired hand at the mixing desk had been constantly shaking his head when we performed, probably not in approval. None of which is actually relevant here ;) But bear with me.
Also, as I only realised much later, we were already completely agile. And at that not even the least exceptional.
In my later career I found many teams struggling to grok agile ways of working. Yet, there were people to whom it seemed completely natural, myself amongst them. How come?