I really had no idea, but I decided that I probably did need to probably go to school if I didn't want to end up like Duke here. And I'd just kind of contemplate my life and where things were going and what I was going to do. Whenever business was slow, I'd just run to the backroom, I’d build a burrito real quick and eat it. My manager was this burly guy named Duke who had a very prominent Confederate flag tattoo on his arm that his uniform didn’t cover. Eventually I needed money to buy food and stuff. I needed to figure out how to make ends meet so I could survive. I could no longer ignore my problems and try to live inside books or inside my own head. My savings from those summers of mowing lawns evaporated. The gravity of the situation hit me fast. Life as a high school dropout living in my car was hard. Then pulling up in the Walmart parking lot and going to sleep. So I was living in my car, and I just started going to the library every day where it was warm and just rotating through all the different libraries around Oklahoma City. And at that moment, I just – within that instant, I just kind of became disillusioned with school and I just decided to drop out. And he had been reduced to doing that to be able to provide for his family. But I saw him in the cafeteria with a hairnet on, serving food. He had a college degree and he’d worked for decades. He always volunteered to lead Sunday school, and I was really good friends with his kid. But one day I was in the cafeteria and I saw a man from my church who had been a huge inspiration to me. Staying in Walmart parking lots overnight where there was light. I spent the next year of my life just living in my car. I grabbed all my stuff and threw it in the car and I just drove off. My grandma had just died and I had inherited her 1986 white Ford Taurus sedan. One day when I was a sophomore in high school, I got sick of fighting with him. My dad was a strict disciplinarian, and we would always fight. My grades and my family situation at home quickly deteriorated.Īfter years of unhappiness, I made a series of dramatic decisions. From then on, I couldn't really look at reality the same way. Then watching the ensuing chaos, watching how people around me reacted. I went from just being what I would describe as a pretty typical middle-class kid in middle America - to starting the question reality, and how we got to this point where something like this wasn't stopped. And he detonated it and killed 168 people, including 19 little babies that were in a nursery on the ground floor. There was building in downtown Oklahoma City and a terrorist had parked a truck in front of it filled with fertilizer. A few minutes later we found out what had happened. We saw the room shaking and we didn't know what happened. All the students, the teacher, everybody looked around and looked at one another. And I'd never been in an earthquake before, but we just assumed it was an earthquake. I was in my science class and suddenly all the beakers started rattling and all the tables started rattling. Here's how I described the event during Jeff's interview: The day my childhood ended was April 19th, 1995. Not just for the families of all the people who died, but for everyone who felt the rumble of the explosion as it tore through the city. I think every kid growing up in Oklahoma City in the 1990s can relate to how devastating the terrorist attack was. But first, here's the part where I describe this period of my life. I've embedded the podcast below, along with the entire transcript. In our 2-hour conversation, we explored the years leading up to me learning to code and building the first version of freeCodeCamp. Software Engineering Daily host Jeff Meyerson interviewed me at length about my past. Yes – I ultimately worked as a reporter, moved to China for several years, and became a school director, managing 25 employees.Īnd yes – all of this happened within the same decade. Yes – I managed to turn my life around – getting a GED while working at Taco Bell, and getting a degree from a commuter school. Yes – things got so bad I spent a year sleeping in my car, in Walmart parking lots around Oklahoma City. While there is still life, there is still potential. You don't have to let anger or nihilism consume you, like I almost did. The reason I'm sharing this now is to show you that I have made mistakes. Mostly because I don't want any kids reading this to think: "I should drop out of school" or "I should run away from home and live on the streets." Please don't do these things. But there's an entire period of my life that I've never talked about before. I've answered most of these questions over the years. They've even created an entire category about me on Quora. But over the past 5 years people have asked me a lot of personal questions.
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