Why did I rush?

In October 2024, I joined Hello Patient, a healthcare startup in Austin. Right after signing, they flew me out around Halloween for two weeks of in-person onboarding. Meanwhile, back in Colorado, my family had tickets to Hamilton. I was in our office on South Lamar learning the codebase, so my ticket went to a friend.

I’m still fucking salty at the math. Nobody made me choose between my youth and my career at some dramatic crossroads. I just stopped guarding my time somewhere along the way.

I was 14 and in a Discord server where a friend made his own bot. It sounded cool, so I tried it. I wrote my first line of code on Thanksgiving break in November of 2018 to make a Discord bot, and six months later I started my own company. The sneaker resale world ran on “cook groups,” Discord servers where resellers coordinated drops, and cook groups needed bots. I eventually became the premier Discord bot developer for the sneaker community before I could even drive.

The bot company was more like my ninth hustle. Lemonade stands, boxes of candy from Smart & Final to sell at school (sorry Mr. Rubin), fidget spinners off AliExpress, Twitch streaming, photography, baseball umpiring, DJing. If it could buy me more V-Bucks, I tried it.

That list was me sampling everything a kid could plausibly do, checking each one for the one thing that stuck. At 14, with a Discord bot, something finally did. The bots themselves came and went like the fidget spinners; what stuck was programming. I’m 22 now and it’s my whole career.

One of the samples didn’t make that list because I’m not proud of it. Before the bots, one of my hustles lived in a grayer corner of Discord than the rest, with a business partner I shouldn’t have had. I’ll leave it at that; I was 13, and I’m long since reformed. There was a miscommunication between us, and his friend doxxed me. Within days my parents were getting threatening phone calls, and one evening a delivery driver showed up with a dozen Domino’s pizzas nobody ordered.

That’s what it looks like when a kid operates in adult markets with a kid’s judgment. The mistake was small, a miscommunication, the kind of thing that happens in group chats every day. The consequences weren’t, and they didn’t land on me. They landed on my mom, answering the phone.

The bots went so well that the CEO of a company in the sneaker space tried to buy mine. I said no; I was in high school. Eventually I sunset the company myself (lol) and went to work for them instead. I learned new languages and shipped real software. I made friends there I still talk to today.

That summer, they were going fully in-person in LA and wanted 16-year-old me, freshly moved to Colorado and still learning to drive, to work at the office all summer. And I said fuck no. I’m not wasting my summer working for you guys.

At 16, I understood, instantly, that my summer was worth more than their office. That kid guarded his time like it was money. Six years later I gave up a Hamilton ticket without a fight.

For a long time I read that as losing my nerve. But at 16, the fuck-no was free. I lived under my parents’ roof, I had no bills, and every dollar I made was a bonus on top of a life someone else was paying for. Refusing a summer in LA cost me nothing, so I refused. By 20, I had rent, a car bill, insurance, and a lease with my name on it.

Once I graduated, refusing the leap became the risk. I aged out of the safety net and started jumping on purpose.

I left that first job alongside a colleague for another sneaker company, writing their software. From there I landed at a startup that grew fast and then shrank. Layoffs took us from a dozen people down to four. I was one of the four, working alone in a silo, and I was miserable. My boss knew it, and instead of squeezing the last miles out of an unhappy engineer, he helped me leave: an introduction, then a recruiter, and the chain ended at Hello Patient, in Austin.

The night before my first-round interview, the power went out at my family’s house in Colorado. My dad is a network engineer, and our house ran on a homelab most small offices would envy. When the power came back, the UPS didn’t, so the internet didn’t, so my Google Home never played my alarm. I slept straight through the entire first round. I woke up, emailed an apology, got another shot, re-interviewed, and got the fucking job.

_{The lab my dad built to make our house bulletproof nearly cost me my career, so I went on to build a homelab of my own in my apartment closet anyway.}

At every turn in this story, an adult is holding a door open. My dad driving me to Smart & Final. A company that let a kid work after school. A boss who engineered my escape from his own team. Interviewers who forgave a no-show they had every right to ghost. I moved to Austin at 20 the same way I do everything, on a six-month trial lease with a U-Haul pod shipped down “if it works out.” The adults holding those doors built as much of that story as I did. My part was showing up young.

I’m 22. People my age are graduating from college right now, starting first jobs, learning what Jira is. I have six to eight years of applied experience shipping software. Being ahead of your peers on a leaderboard is fun; being ahead of them on a timeline is lonely because you’re rarely in the same place at the same time. I rarely meet anyone my age standing where I am, so most of my friends are ten to fifteen years older.

Every learning system faces a tradeoff between exploring (sampling widely to find what’s good) and exploiting (committing to the best thing found so far and mining it). You’re supposed to spend your teens and early twenties in explore mode. That’s what those years are for: sampling identities, friendships, mistakes, cities, versions of yourself. My explore phase was the list: selling shit, umpiring, DJing, streaming. It was thorough and fast, and it terminated at 14. I found a very good answer very early, switched to exploit mode, and spent the next eight years mining it.

Code was the right answer, and it still is. I regret how much exploit mode ate the years that were budgeted for explore. I missed the college friendships, being young and dumb in a dorm, the years spent learning people, and the cities I never tried. I have to explore those now, at 22, while the rest of my life is already running in production.

I got a taste of good money early, took a pay cut for the better opportunity, and I’ve been chasing the old number since (golden handcuffs?). And because I skipped the degree, some part of me is convinced I have to out-earn it. So I’m in my first real grown-up job, asking my boss what it takes and when, fighting to prove I deserve a seat I already hold. It has exhausted me more than once. Some days I don’t want to do any of it. I’m still a side-project monkey, spending my nights on open source and half-built experiments. Maybe that’s a coping mechanism. I’m not diagnosing myself, and neither should you.

At 12: lemonade stands, candy, fidget spinners, Twitch, photography, umpiring, DJing, bots.

At 22: couch, TV, maybe a run, laundry, water the plants.

My folks used to say, “Never rush to grow up.” They said it while doing everything right. They even taught me to drink at home at 17 so that, when I turned 21, I wouldn’t make the mistakes they did. For years I heard the line and thought: yeah, yeah, come on. Bullshit. They were right. I spent my teens counting down to 21, and when it came, the door was already half open. Then 22 came this May and I thought: this isn’t a big deal. What does it matter? Why did I rush?

My best friend from Colorado is moving to Austin at the end of the year, God willing. One person from the before-times is following me into the after.

I love the life I built with my own hands at an age when most people are still learning about the Python GIL. If I could go back five years, I’d do it all again, just slower. I wouldn’t have tried to outperform everybody.