For the past fourteen years I have worked at various Silicon Valley start-ups as a software quality assurance engineer. When I started in the computer industry, the Internet was not readily available to the general public, the World Wide Web had not been invented yet (but I am sure Al Gore was working on it). I wrote software for Apple’s Newton, was a project manager on the iPod and currently work on an android based point of sale system at Clover;. I have worked on Microsoft Windows (at Microsoft), Apple’s Mac OS 9 and OS X (at Apple), embedded Linux and Android (several start-ups). For fun, I play with html, CSS, JavaScript, various content management systems and things I find on the Internet.
When I was young I wanted to be a cowboy. They told me there were no cowboys left in the world; I believed them. I was 37 years old when I discovered that they had lied to me. Saddest day of my life. I love cowboy culture. I find any way I can to spend as much time as I can on ranches. Anybody’s ranch, I don’t care. Especially if there are cattle to tend and horses to tend them on. My perfect job would be riding for a brand, tending cattle in the morning, managing technology in the afternoon but anything that moves me closer to livestock and ranches is the right direction. In the end, I like farms better than cities and ranches better than farms.
At the end of May I left my job at Clover. Using money from Roku stock I will be moving to Montana to start a technology consulting firm that will help ranchers and livestock growers use and manage technology in their operations. This is the culmination of about eight years of dreaming and planning. For the past three years I have been attending the Montana Stockgrowers Association meetings. Learning from the ranchers that I have met and developed friendships with, I have developed some concepts that focus on what they want and need for their operations.
There will be new challenges but I will finally be living and working among the ranchers and cowboys.