Software

Software development is both my career and my passion. Allow me to explain.

The software business is an interesting beast, and living in the San Francisco Bay Area — the epicenter of it all — I get a front-row seat to all the action. From a once-sleepy valley of apricot orchards some thirty miles to the south of old San Fran has emerged an industry that remains America’s most pre-eminent, and arguably its most dynamic.

I came to the business late and early: I got my first computer at the tender age of thirteen (with my Bar Mitzvah money, natch); I was immediately captivated by graphics and human interactivity; when the Macintosh first came out I went nuts. Unable to afford one at the time, I made my humble machine simulate the graphical user experience of MacPaint.

Although other things captivated me as adulthood rolled around, when I finally did make it to California I rediscovered my passion for digital machines. For once, I was in the right place at the right time: although I’d moved to L.A. to make it in the movie biz (that turned out to be something of a non-starter), the dot-com boom was just beginning to go hot. Thanks to two phenomenal managers at a job I’d gotten mostly to pay the rent and get a work visa in the United States, I found I hadn’t lost my love for technology — and with the graphic user interface having achieved maturity and widespread adoption in the 1990s, my career path was set.

Ever since then I’ve specialized in user interface development, and look forward to the day when work in that area might mean holographic interactions a la Minority Report, or something else our imaginations can’t even fathom.