It was twenty years ago today, a Saturday, that I walked across the stage at Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum, shook the Auburn University president’s hand, told him to keep in touch, and accepted a scrap of paper reading “Bachelor of Electrical Engineering”. I worked hard, and Dad spent a lot of money (thanks, Dad!) to get that piece of paper. What kept me in school was the vision of one day having a job, a salary, and being able to buy a car and a new-fangled thing called a CD player. That piece of paper got me a nice job, the job that brought me to Houston, but the funny thing about it is that in all the time I’ve had that piece of paper I haven’t done any electrical engineering. My jobs have all been about computers and code.

By the time I graduated from Auburn, I had already written a lot of code, most of it assembly language for my TRS-80 Color Computer. At my first job, with Singer-Link Flight Simulation, I wrote weapons simulations in FORTRAN for the F-16 simulator. More importantly, I learned C and Unix. I moved from Link to a small consulting company called Jackson and Associates, where I put my C and Unix skills to work, and also picked up experience writing X11 code and Motif widgets (yes, they’re really called widgets). After a brief stay in Boston as a contract programmer, I came back to Houston and spent most of the next five years at Western Geophysical writing more X11 and Unix code in C and C++. Next I moved to Rockwell, which later became United Space Alliance. I’m still employed at USA, and have spent over ten years here in USA’s Advanced Technology Department.

Even though I haven’t done any electrical engineer, my experience at Auburn has served me well. I learned sound engineering principles which I apply on a regular basis; I learned critical thinking; and I learned how to work with others in a professional setting. All in all, it’s been a couple of decades.

War Eagle!

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