110 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
110 lines
6.1 KiB
Markdown
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layout: post
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title: Rejected Bio from The Setup
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{{ page.title }}
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================
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<p class="meta">03 May 2011 - San Francisco</p>
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Yesterday, [the autobiographical post I wrote for The
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Setup](http://tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com/) went live. I wrote that post
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over a year ago and then entered into an epic battle with
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[@waferbaby](http://twitter.com/#!/waferbaby) about the length of my "Who are
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you, and what do you do?" section. He said it was too long. I said it could
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not be shortened. And so the post sat for a year, collecting dust, neither of
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us prepared to back down.
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About a month ago I decided that it was foolish to let the words I had written rot on my hard drive and so I did the only thing I knew how to do: overreact. So I cut the original nine-hundred words of my bio down to fourteen words and resubmitted it to Daniel. Those are the words you see in the post now.
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For your pleasure, here is the original bio in its full, unabridged glory.
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<hr />
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My name is Tom Preston-Werner. I find that the hyphenated last name
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makes me sound distinguished and worth listening to. I grew up three
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decades ago in a small city in Iowa along the Mississippi, which means
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I shucked a lot of corn and know exactly how many mosquitos will land
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on your arm should you hold it still for ten minutes at dusk on the
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muggiest day of the summer. As an aspiring theoretical particle
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physicist, I worked my way through entire shelves of scientific
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literature from the public library, desperately wanting to understand
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the bewildering mathematics that littered the pages like so many
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leaves on the bottom of that morning's cup of green tea. I searched in
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vain for instructors or classmates that could provide me with the
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insight necessary to comprehend the true meaning of Heisenberg's
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Uncertainty Principle, but all I found were underpaid math teachers
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and disillusioned "students" in search of their next smoke break.
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After obsessing over US News' Best Colleges reports for months I
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finally chose and was accepted to Harvey Mudd, a tiny engineering
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school in California famous for assigning the greatest number of hours
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of homework per night. This sounded just perfect to me. Finally a
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place I could bring up the EPR Paradox and not be immediately
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stigmatized as "that science weirdo with the hilariously thick glasses
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and unfortunate hairdo."
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Mudd did not disappoint. But now I had the opposite problem. In order
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to properly understand particle physics, you must have a deep and
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profound love of math. You have to be so comfortable with abstract
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concepts that even Picasso would be jealous. Ironically, in order to
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grasp the fundamental reality of our universe, you must forget about
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the "reality" of everyday life and start living in a world comprised
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of eigenvectors, Hilbert spaces, and Planck's constant. This was a
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leap I could not make. I like math, but I'm too easily distracted by
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macroscopic reality to make it my profession.
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Once I accepted that I would never spend late nights poring over
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bubble chamber printouts at Fermilab, it became obvious that I was
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destined to enter computer science. I started programming in BASIC on
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a TRS-80 that my dad bought from Radio Shack when I was 8 years old.
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Since then, I'd learned to love the discipline and creativity involved
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in making a machine do my bidding. It was like having a super-obedient
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but annoyingly logical little brother. He'll do anything you want as
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long as you tell him in precise and unambiguous language. The best
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thing is, the feedback is immediate. In physics, it can take twenty
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years to prove that a single esoteric particle even exists. When
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you're writing a program that displays the number of electrons in each
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of the shells around the nucleus of every element, the feedback is
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immediate and intoxicating. With just a few keystrokes, the world is
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changed forever. Try to get that kind of rush even once in a lifetime
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as a theoretical particle physicist. I dare you.
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In 1999, after two years of college, I dropped out of Harvey Mudd to
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join a startup with some friends that were graduating. It was the end
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of the first dot-com bubble and I thought I could strike it rich,
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right then and there. Sadly, like so many startups of the day, we
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never accomplished what we envisioned and I ended up bouncing between
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jobs and consulting gigs for six years until I found myself in San
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Francisco. If Harvey Mudd was my mecca for physicists, then San
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Francisco was my mecca for programmers. Where else can you be grabbing
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lunch at a taqueria and overhear a group at the next table discussing
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the finer points of optimizing C code to run on an embedded processor?
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I moved to San Francisco to take a job as a Ruby developer with a
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Wikipedia search engine called Powerset. I also began attending Ruby
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meetups and drinking with local software developers. There are a lot
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of talented people in the Bay Area and I wanted to meet them all.
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Within the Ruby community, a distributed version control system called
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Git was starting to get some attention. It was a really cool way of
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working with other people on code, but there wasn't an easy way to get
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up and running with a group of developers. Along with cofounders Chris
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Wanstrath and PJ Hyett (who I met at the Ruby meetups) I started a
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company called GitHub that would address this problem and make it dead
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simple to share Git repositories and collaborate on code with other
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developers.
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At first, we worked on GitHub on the side, putting in time on evenings
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and weekends. After six months we launched the site to the public and
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started charging. Not long after that, Powerset was acquired by
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Microsoft and I was faced with a choice: stay on as a Microsoft
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employee with a big retention bonus and give up GitHub or turn down
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the Microsoft money and quit Powerset to work on GitHub full-time. You
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can read more about this saga in my blog post entitled [How I Turned
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Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on
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GitHub](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k.html).
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I think I made the right decision.
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Today GitHub has twenty-nine employees and more than 730,000 users with over
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2,000,000 repositories. We're growing fast, and I'm having the time of
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my life! |