My Time At Twitch

I didn't study Computer Science, exactly. I didn't really have any particular goals or ambitions going into college. I was getting paid to go to school. I spent five years getting a Physics degree, but took enough CS classes to get a minor. I ran an independent newspaper and had six roommates in Kirksville, Missouri. Most of the people I knew in the Physics or CS programs went to a small handful of companies in Missouri or the Midwest, but I didn't want to do that, I moved to Chicago and got a job job doing software QA at Jellyvision for $15 an hour. I had three roommates in Wicker Park and paid $370 for rent. After that I was unemployed for 6 months, before getting a "Cloud Specialist" role at Cloudbakers, a small software consultancy in Chicago. It was originally a non-engineering role, but I slowly did more and more coding until I was a promoted to Data Engineer.

I always wanted to move to the Bay Area — my family is from here, I was born here, and it is, of course, the place to be in the tech industry. I made this happen in the worst possible time, March of 2020, where I got a contract role at Twitch and moved to an apartment in Berkeley, which was a total ghost town. I was then hired full-time: in the course of one year, I doubled my salary twice. It was also, in every other respect, the worst year of my entire life. But things got better.

I worked at Twitch for five years — two of which I lived in New York City. I was promoted to Senior Engineer in 2024. January 5 is my last day, and I plan on taking an indefinite sabbatical.

I have approached my career with a modest ambition and high level of risk aversion. On some level, tech is not really something I planned to do. When I graduated college, I wanted to be a writer, and thought I would take a few years saving money in order to more comfortably get an MFA. Here I am nine years later, not doing that. But I do feel like this paid off: I am 32 and have a tremendous amount of personal freedom: the luxury to take time off, and a wealth of experience that allows me to do almost anything I want in an industry that, despite its problems, I have grown to appreciate and enjoy. I haven't quite decided what I am going to do yet, but some ideas include writing on this blog, writing on substack, building some web apps, doing part-time consulting, and making YouTube videos. I hope you follow me on this journey.