One fall day in the late 1970s in Pennsylvania, as I knelt on the roof of a new home and hammered nails into plywood in a bitterly cold wind, I had a sudden realization. My father’s long-ago advice was right: I needed a college degree.
So I came home to California, and settled in Santa Barbara, a few hours’ drive from where I grew up in Irvine. I entered Santa Barbara City College, intending to become a mechanical engineer, working on renewable energy projects, which I thought was the coming thing.
In a required introductory programming class, I found that I liked writing software. When I transferred to UCSB, I changed my major to computer science and graduated just in time for the takeoff of the internet.