University of California, Berkeley Days

This essay is part of my extended autobiography. It precedes the story of Design Reactor and is collected on my About page.

Finding the web at Cal

At UC Berkeley in the mid-1990s, I found the technology that would shape the rest of my career: the early World Wide Web. When I initially arrived at Cal for freshman year, I felt out of place after growing up in Maryland. While I had enjoyed learning BASIC and Pascal programming on own, I honestly felt a sense of imposter syndrome in my freshman Computer Science CS60A class compared to my much better trained classmates who seemed to have lived and breathe C++ and Solaris where as my programming hobby was informal and idiosyncratic by comparison. That all changed in early 1994 while at the Wheeler Hall computer lab and seeing for the first time another person using NCSA Mosaic. As much as an imposter that I felt in the dark workstation labs of Evans Hall doing programming projects, I quickly became enamored and obsessed with web programming, which mixed basic graphic and information design with trial-and-error results in an instant via a quick browser refresh as opposed to the agonizingly long compile times on the Sun Sparc Stations that we had to use for our coursework.

In 1995, I took my first web-related job as Site Architect and Webmaster for the Haas School of Business. It gave me a chance to put newly acquired programming skills to use while working with faculty and students at the very beginning of the internet boom. Many of the people I met there would later become internet entrepreneurs themselves, and the experience made the emerging industry feel both real and within reach.

Starting Go! Designs

During my third year, two friends and I formed Go! Designs, a small web-design firm and my first foray into startup life. We moved into the same cramped apartment on Durant Avenue and spent the time outside class taking on client work, learning by doing, and trying to make a young business work. It was an early introduction to the mix of craft, responsibility, and improvisation that comes with building for other people.

By senior year, the work had begun to take over. I was close to full-time at Haas and spent nights and weekends on the firm; college classes received far less of my attention than they should have, and my grades suffered accordingly. I do not romanticize that trade-off, but the experience clarified something important: I wanted to build products and companies on the internet after graduation.

That conviction led directly to the next chapter: the web-design work that became Design Reactor.