#Amazon dim3 direction software#

I went back to grad school, now determined to get a PhD so that I could land a research position at Xerox or Microsoft. I lasted three months the company was quite dysfunctional, they were expecting 80-hour workweeks, the management were outright abusive, and of course my pain was flaring up and every time I tried to take a break from typing I’d get yelled at for “goofing off.” When I graduated, I got a job as a graphics programmer at a defense contractor in the DC area. I took pride in how much I was hurting, because it was proof, somehow, that I was giving it my all. I was also starting to develop pain in my body, especially when working long, obsessive hours on my programming projects. com things were web stuff, which I had very little interest in. Anyway, my big focus was on graphics, and all of these. I decided to stay behind to get my degree, though, in case the. While I was in college, the whole “dot com” boom was starting, and many of my classmates dropped out so that they could pursue big financial gains as contractors. (I had intended to double-major in both CS and music, but the CS course load on its own was already a bit more than I could handle.)

In the meantime I also had some part-time jobs I was running the computing exhibits at the local children’s museum, and also had a job building computers at a local beige-box shop.īasically, my life revolved around computers at this point, and so when I started college, I immediately declared my major: computer science. There I learned a lot about accessibility needs, neurodiversity (honestly, I should have probably been a student in the program myself!), and also useful skills like computer networking and systems administration. But then I was given a much better opportunity: helping to run a computer lab for “twice-exceptional” students. My job was ostensibly to develop video processing software, but I ended up just fetching coffee and making copies for the full-time employees, and at one point a contractor sent me on a wild goose chase which eventually led me to being let go from the internship. My senior year I had an internship at a local research lab.

#Amazon dim3 direction software#

Ostensibly I was supposed to do a bunch of gruntwork with building out event lists on linear tape machines for other people to edit, but I ended up spending most of my time playing with the live production equipment, where they had a (brand new) Video Toaster and then-cutting-edge motion graphics software and Lightwave 3D and so on. I thought of how neat it’d be to experience life as a lobster or a dragon or a mote of dust. The first Virtual Reality craze was just getting started and I was amazed at the idea of being able to put on some hardware and then experience a completely different life.

I also got very into 3D rendering, and loved the idea that you could make entirely different worlds to inhabit. I got really into CAD and house design, and thought maybe I’d be an architect. Throughout high school my computer explorations broadened. It was so amazing to be able to send an email to researchers and actually get a response! I probably annoyed the hell out of them. I first got on the Internet in 1991, at age 13. To me, computers were devices for making art, and music, and communicating with people from all around the world. But programming itself never felt like a career it was a tool for exploring other things, a means of enabling other stuff. I came across an old issue of Creative Computing which got me extremely interested in graphics programming. I learned about artificial intelligence (at age 12 I’d figured out genetic algorithms on my own!) and got deep into theoretical math (especially fractals, which I found to be absolutely fascinating). In middle and high school I always saw programming as a means to an end. But it always felt like it was too fun to be a job. Programming was a fun hobby, though, and I’d get totally lost in it for hours at a time. Or at least that’s what it said in a diary I found from when I was 7 or so. That said, even at that age I didn’t think I’d be a computer programmer when I grew up.

The many amazing games on the platform were such formative memories for me, and it just seemed so magical.

It was so fascinating, being able to write things on the computer and have the computer do them. It all really started when I was 5 and my parents bought a Commodore 64.