The Forrest Gump of Tech

Early Armor and Resilience

• I had an unusual childhood. I skipped two grades, so my third year of school was in fifth grade.
• Being consistently the youngest kid in the room made me a frequent target for detractors trying to cut down what they didn't understand. It was tough, but it gave me an impenetrable armor and a deep resilience that served me through high-stakes legal battles, business adventures, and public life.

Half a Century of Adventures

• Over the last 50 years, I've had a true rock-and-roll life across technology, travel, and the arts:
  • Visited 69 countries across the globe.
  • Logged 488 days at sea across all seven oceans.
  • Logged 270 hours as Pilot-in-Command (PIC) in small aircraft.
  • Flown 2 million lifetime miles on Delta (Delta 2 Million Miler).
  • Walked the ancient 11,000-year-old stones of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey and climbed Machu Picchu in Peru.
  • Descended 1,200 feet into the deep ocean in a bathysphere submarine.
  • Performed as a paid stand-up comedian.
  • Co-authored the canonical Perl books (Camel book, Llama book) with Larry Wall that bootstrapped the early Web.
  • Invented The Schwartzian Transform sorting algorithm.
  • Hosted FLOSS Weekly for over a decade, interviewing every pioneer of open source.
  • Served as a founding Day-1 Flutter Google Developer Expert (GDE) for 8 years.

The Philosophy

• Starting about 20 years ago, I made an assessment: "When someone writes my autobiography, they're gonna put it in fiction because it couldn't have happened all to one person."
• My only goal has always been to make the world a little better by the end of today, leave things cleaner than I found them, and have a hell of an adventure along the way.