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, and 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 about that, because at 16 I refused to spend a summer working in an office, and four years later I gave up a Hamilton ticket without a fight. I’m trying to work out what changed.

Before programming, I tried pretty much anything that could buy me more V-Bucks. 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. The bot company was more like my ninth business.

Another business was on Discord, with a partner I shouldn’t have had, and I’m not proud of it. I’ll leave it at that, I was 13 and I’m long since reformed. We had a miscommunication, his friend doxxed me, and within days my parents were getting threatening phone calls. One evening a delivery driver showed up with a dozen Domino’s pizzas nobody ordered. My mom was answering threatening calls because of someone I’d gone into business with at 13.

A year later, a friend in a Discord server made his own bot, and I thought it sounded cool, so I tried it. I wrote my first line of code on Thanksgiving break in November of 2018, and six months later I started my own company. The sneaker resale world ran on “cook groups,” Discord servers where resellers coordinated drops, and those groups needed bots. I was building them for the sneaker community before I could even drive, and unlike the other things I’d tried, programming became my career.

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, but eventually I shut the company down myself (lol) and went to work for them instead. I learned new languages and shipped software, and 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.

It was easy to say that when I lived with my parents, had no bills, and every dollar I made was extra money. By 20, I had rent, a car bill, insurance, and a lease with my name on it. I had more to think about when a job asked something of me, but I’m still bothered by how easily I gave up something I wanted to do.

I left that first job alongside a colleague for another sneaker company, writing their software, then joined a startup that grew fast and laid people off. We went from a dozen people down to four, I was one of the four, and I was miserable working alone. My boss knew it and helped me find another job, making an introduction that eventually got me to a recruiter and Hello Patient.

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. When the power came back, the UPS didn’t, so the internet didn’t, so my Google Home never played my alarm, and I slept straight through the entire first round. I woke up, emailed an apology, got another shot, re-interviewed, and got the fucking job.

_{I went on to build a homelab of my own in my apartment closet anyway.}

I moved to Austin at 20, on a six-month trial lease with a U-Haul pod shipped down “if it works out.” I’d had a lot of help getting there, from my dad driving me to Smart & Final to a boss helping me leave his own team. A company let me work after school, and the Hello Patient interviewers gave me another chance after I slept through the first one.

I’m 22 now, and people my age are graduating from college and starting their first jobs, while I’ve been writing software for nearly eight years. Most of my friends are ten to fifteen years older than me, and I rarely meet anyone my age with the same experience. I missed the college friendships and being young and dumb in a dorm, and I wish I’d spent more time getting to know people and trying other cities before committing so much of my life to work.

I got a taste of good money early, took a pay cut for a better opportunity, and I’ve been trying to get back to the old number since. Because I skipped the degree, some part of me is convinced I have to earn more to make up for it, so I’m asking my boss what it takes and when, even though I already have the job. It’s exhausted me more than once, and some days I don’t want to do any of it.

I still spend nights on open source and half-built experiments, and maybe that’s a coping mechanism, I don’t know. At 12 I was trying every way I could think of to make money, now a night might be TV, maybe a run, laundry, watering the plants. I regret how much of my teens I spent trying to get further ahead.

My folks used to say, “Never rush to grow up.” 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 them and thought, yeah, yeah, come on. Bullshit. I spent my teens counting down to 21, 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.

I love my life, and if I could go back five years, I’d do it all again, just slower. I wouldn’t have tried to outperform everybody.