JohnA lifeBlog

Normally, when I post an anniversary post, I post the Second Act’s opening tune from one of my favorite musicals (Rent), then do the math of the song Seasons Of Love.

Tonight, I’ve decided to proceed differently. Although you will still be subjected to Seasons of Love…

The truth is that, I hit the 5 year mark recently. And wow, how life has changed. There is so much to talk about, and a future to predict, but let’s start small.

When I moved here, I did so because my bestest friend in the whole world asked me to. I was living in Pensacola, FL at the time, working a lame but profitable job. We talked, and somehow he convinced me that my best opportunity was to cash in my bank account, pile everything I owned into a U-Haul, and just see what would happen. When I arrived in Merced, I had no extra money, no vehicle, no friends, and no hope. I have gone back to my first blog posts, and was floored at how awful my situation was. For reals… check out these posts… they were not the posts of a person who was looking forward to the future.

Over the months and years, things changed. I bought my first Mac quite some time ago, even though I hated the idea of being a Mac person. I lamented the fact that I couldn’t drive. I hated that I moved to a place I’d never seen.

But through all of this, I have persevered. I have survived, and, to be honest, I have done amazingly well for myself. I came, I saw, I cried, but in the end, I conquered.

At this point, our business will continue to grow leaps and bounds beyond what we could imagine. I mean, even as I write this, we have been hiring people left and right to TRY to keep up with our growth.

I am now in a position where what I do matters… especially outside some kind of appointed committee. At this point, every single line of code I write impacts thousands of people. Isn’t that cool?

Apple doesn’t want me, and Amazon won’t consider me because I cannot recall the properties of basic Java objects off the top of my head. To the large corporations, I say, F**** YOU!. Here I am, helping merchants earn insane amounts of money every single day. If you cannot see past my lack of a college degree, or the fact that I haven’t memorized the JDK specification, then sadly it is your loss.

As for me? I plan to keep writing code, keep forging relationships, and keep giving presentations (where you’ll probably find Amazon.com’s All-Star developers taking feverish notes). Not that I am bitter or something…

So, 5 years have passed since I moved to a place I didn’t know, with a future uncertain. Today, I feel like I’ve (pardon the expression) pwned the folks who followed the traditional path. I am sincerely grateful that the recruiter from Amazon.com passed me by because I couldn’t immediately recall the primitives of the JVM. I am grateful that I didn’t have a Ph.D., which is why Google didn’t hire me.

I am content. I am happy that I am me. And, to be honest, when Google calls me and my partners (as they ALREADY HAVE), I can be pleased to know that they need me far more than I need them.

My future is in innovation… not in the past. Happy 11th Anniversary, UltraCart. I hope you are “content” on only being in the top 8,000 of every single internet site in the entire world. It’s not Google, but at least I can watch what I do make a difference in the lives of thousands of individual entrepreneurs around the world.

Oh, and we truely “Do No Evil”… something that GOOG seems to have forgotten…

Internet, Life, Technology