Pipe Chair

Before my career started.

I was a teenager. I was being paid as an engineer, but I don't count those years. A subsidiary of a subsidiary of a large corporation, a tiny company that had just been formed. I was hired as a part-time developer. A junior from my college days who worked in Akihabara introduced me. Without him, I would not be in IT.

The office was in Yushima. Walking distance to Akihabara. I say office, but it was a room in an apartment building. The vain president insisted on calling it an office.

It was the height of the i-mode era. Every time a new handset came out, everyone scrambled to get one. Then and now, those were never technology devices. They were devices that carried communication. People buy handsets because they want to connect with people. That has not changed.

I was writing HDML. Building something like a proto-dating site. In a room in an apartment building, sitting on a folding metal chair, writing code in Hidemaru. No ergonomic chair. No IDE. A pipe chair and a text editor. That was enough.

That junior later joined me in starting my first company, and a long bond followed. The IDC rack I bought out wholesale — that was from him too. Twists and turns along the way, but we have both survived to this day.

The person who pulled my teenage self into IT is still selling me servers, twenty years later.