Building from Zero After Addiction, Prison, and a Felony

I spent ages 14–16 in a maximum-security juvenile prison, became a felon at 19, lost almost everything to addiction, and later rebuilt my life through software, open source, and a few people who took a chance on me.

I've wanted to write this for a while, but kept finding reasons not to. It felt too personal, too risky, and too easy to misread.

Recently, I decided on two things:

1. After seeing Preston Thorpe speak publicly about his own background, I wondered how many others like us were silently lurking in tech
2. I'm far enough in my career with enough contributions to OSS and community involvement, that I think I'll probably be alright

I wrote this for anyone quietly wondering whether they have no chance at a future.

Below is the much-condensed life story of my struggles with addiction, poverty, and incarceration + life after being a felon. My hope is that it serves as encouragement to others who are in similar circumstances that things CAN get better.

Amphetamine Addict and Prison at 14

I was a model student up until around puberty and middle school. Then, I think a combination of being bullied for being overweight and teenage hormones, led me to be just the wrong combination of resentful, angry, unhappy, and rebellious.

I started getting in fistfights with people that made fun of me, being a huge asshole to teachers, stopped doing schoolwork, and started experimenting with drugs.

The beginning of the end: The day I bought an Adderall from a classmate. When that amphetamine feeling kicked-in, it was as if life was perfect for the first time. I was happy, confident, felt I could do anything. I wanted to feel this way every waking moment for the rest of my life.

Being 14, I had no job, and I do not come from money. So, logically, I did the thing one must do if one wishes to sustain a drug habit: Devise a way to make money.

The easiest way to make money at 14 turned out to be dealing drugs, so I started selling various prescription medications on a "buy-low-sell-high" basis from other students at school.

This was short-lived, as I had the huge mouth of a rebellious "I'm invincible" 14-year old boy, and I was shortly arrested and charged with 17 counts of Possession with Intent to Manufacture or Distribute a Scheduled II Controlled Substance.

I wound up spending 2 years, from 14-16 at a maximum security juvenile prison (Lookout Mountain YSC, Golden CO).

Freedom - Shortly Lived

In prison, I got my GED, and after release briefly enrolled in community college. I was working as a landscaper doing manual labor for $8/hr and then riding a bus 1hr each way to night classes. Not to say this sort of thing can't be done (people do it all the time), but I didn't have the tenacity or motivation to keep it up, so I dropped out.

I stayed sober for a brief period between 16-17. Not having learned my lesson, I again started selling drugs. I had learned about The Silk Road and the Darknet and was ordering (what was then) a legal "Research Chemical" with effects similar to MDMA (Methylone/bk-MDMA) shipped to my parents house. Eventually, my dad got home early from work and intercepted a package. Asking me what it was before I left for work, I told him "I don't know, never heard of the return address name". My father was not an idiot; he told me he was going to open it while I was at work, so I confessed "it's drugs."

Cue huge argument, him insisting he was going to remove everything from my room except my clothes and bed (most of which I paid for myself) and I would not be allowed to leave except for work. This was not an agreeable circumstance to me, so I refused -- at which point my dad said "then you won't be living here anymore!".

It's important to note that in Colorado (at the time, at least), emancipation of a minor was not a status one could file for, but instead purely a court status to be recognized during legal proceedings. That meant there was technically no avenue for me to legally move out before 18 with proper legal status.

So this, to me, sounded like sweet freedom & release, rather than a punishment. "You really won't call the police if I leave?" "Nope." I packed my backpack with my laptop and cash savings, and a suitcase with my clothes, and left. I had no plan but that was a bridge to be crossed.

It turned out that the parents of a friend had an unused bedroom in their trailer they would rent to me under-the-table for $300/mo. I jumped at that and slept on the floor of a trailer for 6 months.

I worked as a landscaper, at a lumber mill, and as a cashier at Walgreens, continuing to sell drugs on the side.

Inevitably, I wound up being arrested again on drug-related charges, and spent 18-19 in county jail. It was then that I became a convicted felon with a low-class felony.

A Serendipitous News Article & a Software Job

While I was in county jail, one day the newspaper had a small article in it: "Tech company offers internships to at-risk & underprivileged youth"

I had spent my childhood on the computer, playing videogames and eventually teaching myself to program to make game mods. I knew from a young age I wanted to be a programmer (I thought I wanted to make videogames, as most young children do).

This to me, seemed like a fortuitous opportunity. I cut the article out and put it in a documents folder.

Eventually, I was moved from regular jail population into the Work-Release jail program, where they let you out during the day for work. You had 1 week to find a job, and if you couldn't secure employment you were sent back permanently to finish out your sentence.

The first day out, I walked into the offices of the company from the article and asked to speak to someone. I explained that I was fresh out of jail and had seen their article while inside.

They interviewed me, decided to hire me, and I was now an intern Full-Stack Web Developer! I knew nothing of web dev, and didn't even particularly have an interest in it originally, but the job was already beyond my hopes. I had assumed I was going to spend the rest of my life working construction or similar, because of my felony.

The same news reporter that had done the original article later came to visit, and after interviewing me, did a whole writeup on it!

• https://www.dailycamera.com/2017/05/12/boulder-tech-academies-swamped-as-they-race-to-retrain-workers/

Working at Techtonic was the best possible early-career experience I think anyone could have had. They did contract development, a lot of which was greenfield Saas MVP launches, across various tech stacks. There was not a lot of time for mentorship so it a very "trial-by-fire" experience -- either figure things out and ship stuff, or get the boot.

I learned frontend, backend, and dev-ops while there and worked across several languages + DB's. This was around the time Ruby on Rails + MongoDB was the hip thing. ES6 JS was still fresh and new, and it was there that our CTO did a company meeting on this new thing called "React" that we were to start learning to replace jQuery.

It's also where I met my now-wife, who I pulled into my drug use and unstable life.

Drugs, Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Being possibly the most hardheaded individual in the universe, I fell back into drug use shortly thereafter. I managed to remain mostly-functional, until the manager at Techtonic (who did not like me) lied to the owner that I was showing up hours late every day.

She fired me (and my now-wife), and I was later redeemed when they found the truth in his Slack message history after firing him many moons later. But oh whale, "them's the breaks", as they say.

Not having a job, I spiraled harder into addiction, and eventually ran out of money to pay my rent and bills. We moved in with my biological father in Florida. He was also an addict, and instead of stability, the situation became enabling and destructive. It exploded in short order.

From Zero

After the living situation with my father exploded, I was fortunate enough to have a friend who had a spare room in the house and agreed to let me and my (now wife) stay with them for some tiny sum of money, but only temporarily until we could find work + save enough to move out and get back on our feet.

It was at this point we had nothing: A few dollars to our name, no vehicle, some clothing and a single laptop.

I had lost everything. And I had dragged this poor woman into it with me who had lost everything, too.

It was at this point my sobriety began. I had hit what we addicts call "a bottom". Not the first one, but the one that was finally grim and bleak enough to make me look at myself and go "What the fuck are you doing?" The one that finally knocked it into my skull that I didn't want to live like this anymore.

I started washing dishes at a restaurant, and my wife took a job delivering and installing large appliances (ovens, fridges, etc) at the same warehouse where the friend worked. Having no vehicle, she had to borrow the friend's bicycle and ride 30 minutes in the dark before work, and 30 minutes in the sweltering heat after work home. The hours were very long, because it was often on-site installation paid by the appliance, so many days she would work 10-12 hours + 1 hour bike ride, and come home so exhausted all she could do was sob a little before getting just enough sleep to do it all over again the next day.

Eventually, she told me that it made more sense for me to quit my job while she worked, so that I could spend all of my free time trying to get another tech job. So she alone carried us for several months. I sent out hundreds of applications. I went through final-round interviews and received offer letters from 8 companies, only to have them rescinded each time due to corporate "No Felons" HR policies. It was like having the carrot dangled right in front of my face, to be snatched away each time.

Finally, I got an interview with a tiny startup in Miami. I passed their phone screen, and drove 4 hours each way to do the in-person.

They offered me the job, and helped pay for us to relocate and temporarily stay in Airbnb's. It paid $50k, with the promise of a significant raise in 1 year when the company had more revenue. I was overjoyed with the offer and immediately accepted.

Hasura, Open Source, and the Door That Stayed Open

The system at work was an ageing Rails app that had accrued significant tech debt and was the result of an amalgam of outsourced development shops. One of them was clearly quite proficient, and the others... not so much. Part of my job was designing and implementing a V2 rewrite. While evaluating technologies for this, I stumbled upon Hasura

• https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine

Put simply, it automated the work of generating CRUD for Postgres apps, and was designed by people who clearly had hit the limitations of traditional Backend-as-a-Service type platforms. Only core CRUD was automated, and you integrated the rest of your app through wiring up your own API endpoints and implementing your own AuthN + AuthZ.

The first time I plugged in our localhost Postgres URL for dev, and had a full working CRUD API, I was hooked. Coming from a background of rapidly churning out SaaS MVP's, this was solving a very real problem for me, and it was PERFORMANT.

I became heavily involved in the Discord server, answering other people's questions, and also started sending PR's to implement features I felt were missing.

When my 1 year anniversary came around at work, the founders unfortunately still were not in a position to pay me much more. I knew the financials of the business and they weren't lying, but it was still somewhat of a disappointment. One of the Hasura employees had recently made a joke that I should just apply to work there. I figured that it couldn't hurt to at least get more info.

I went through the interview rounds more as a formality and was given an offer letter. I was offered slightly more than double my current salary! I genuinely loved working with the founders at my current job and felt terrible about leaving, but I did accept the offer and stay on for another month to finish up current work and make sure there was someone to hand off to.

The company was so small back then that there was no background check done during the interview process. After working there a while, I eventually disclosed to the Hasura founders that I had a low-grade felony, and, thank the stars, they were cool with it.

I had my dream job: Working on a developer-facing tool I genuinely loved and was a power-user of, that was also part of the Postgres ecosystem. I could not have conceived of such a perfectly-fit position. I have been working at Hasura (now PromptQL) since 2020, and I plan on riding this one all the way to it's end: either fired, bankrupt, or bought-out. (Hopefully bought-out).

Conclusion

I don't tell this story because I think it is clean, heroic, or universally applicable -- It isn't. I made TERRIBLE choices. I hurt people who loved me. I wasted chances that other people would have killed for. And even when I finally started doing the right things, I still needed luck, help, timing, forgiveness, and people willing to judge me by what I could do next instead of only by what I had done before.

But that is exactly why I wanted to write this.

If you are reading this from the middle of addiction, poverty, a criminal record, or some other hole that feels permanent: I won't insult you by claiming it's easy. It may be unfair for a long time. You may have to hear "no" from people who never even look at your work. You may have to rebuild with less room for mistake than everyone around you.

But you are not necessarily finished.

And if you are in a position to hire, mentor, review pull requests, or let someone into a room they normally would not be allowed into: please remember that talent is not evenly distributed by background check. Sometimes the person who looks risky on paper is also the person who will spend years trying to become worthy of the chance they were given.

I am alive, sober, married, employed, and working on software I care about because a handful of people took that risk on me.

I wake up grateful for that every day. And I hope, over time, to become the kind of person who gives that same chance to someone else.

AI Use Disclaimer: claude code was used to generate the OpenGraph SVG image.

No part of the prose was machine-generated. You will not find machine-written prose on this blog. I consider it deeply disrespectful.