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Mike Riley
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I have often been asked what prompted me to pursue a career in technology. It wasn’t a single episodic event, but rather a layering of inspirational moments that ignited the passion that still fuels me today.
Long before the days of full stack development, Kubernetes, cloud, and hundreds of programming languages, the typical office of the 1960s was populated with typewriters, adding machines, and for the fortunate few, one or more mimeograph machines. It was in this environment that my father brought my brother and me to spend the day. One particular item of interest to me was a brand-new IBM Selectric typewriter that had spherical, rotating ball of letters that would quickly reposition itself to the letter matching the key pressed on the typewriter’s keyboard. It was quite a toy beyond what toddlers had access to in those days.
… rather than take a hammer to the apparently defunct item, I started troubleshooting the problem.
While growing up, my dad would also bring home broken electronics from the office, destined for the trash heap. My brother and I would gleefully take hammers to the enclosures to discover the vast world of circuit boards, capacitors (that would sometimes pop like caps when struck open), resistors, and wiring that we would occasionally stockpile for future projects (such as attaching HO scale electric train accessories). As my curiosity about what exactly we were dismantling grew, I began to examine connections more closely, and rather than take a hammer to the apparently defunct item, I started troubleshooting the problem. Imagine my delight when I would discover a cracked trace or a dangling wire that, once corrected, would bring the dead device back to life. I soon gained a reputation as a young electronics tinkerer and repair technician, even though my work was hardly remarkable.
A line-drawn dungeon game that transformed my understanding of the possibilities …
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