Mayor Justin

After my mother passed away when I was 14 years old there were many members of my family that stepped up and became an even bigger part of my life.  While they could never replace my mother(they didn’t try), but they all played a huge role in shaping the person that I am today, especially my Uncle John.

After battling bladder and prostate cancer over the last 8 years, my Uncle John passed away this past weekend. A few months ago, prior to him getting really sick, we had some great conversations in the hospital where I got a chance to tell him how much he meant to me over the years. In those conversations, we briefly touched on the fact that he was a huge influence on my career. So here is the story of how that came to be.

My Uncle was a programmer at AT&T for about 20 years before retiring in the late 90’s.  He wasn’t just a programmer though, he was long time computer and technology nut. He was always bringing over new computer stuff to play with, whether it was the latest voice recognition setup, some new application, or even more recently the new Lego Mindstorms. He loved them, everything about them. You could just see it in his face, it would light up.

Growing up, I loved these moments with him. We would sit down and just play with all these cools things. On the surface, as a kid, it was just play but looking back on it now, it was his subtle way of teaching me. He’d do a great job of explaining how things worked and showing me how to build stuff.

It was probably some time in 1993 that my Uncle had just taken a 5 day class on Visual Basic 3.0.  He came over the next week with 14(seriously) 3.5 inch floppies, a huge binder(from the class), and a big smile.  He had to show me what he just learned, he just had to.

It was now time to learn how to really program.  I was all for it, it had to be fun, everything else he had shown me over the years was a blast, so why wouldn’t this?  We dove in and he enthusiastically taught me what he had just learned.  He left me with the binder and told me to continue on with it until he came back later on in the week.  So I did…I couldn’t stop actually, it was addicting.

So pretty much from that day forward, I’ve had this crazy infatuation with programming.  So much that I’d ditch school work in high school and college(I spent 3 years getting a BS in chemistry before I studied computer engineering) just so that I could code.  Eventually it turned into my career and it didn’t matter what it was, I could code anything and it was fun just as my Uncle taught me it should be.

Thanks Uncle John for not just showing me how much fun technology(especially programming) could be but for also laying the groundwork for where I am today and where I’ll be going tomorrow. Its been a blast, just the way you’d want it to be.