In 2011 I was working in New York City and living in the suburbs. I had my first job doing web programming, though it was all on the backend, a projection of my insecurities after a half-decade of writing C++ programs that ran on OpenVMS. My team was responsible for figuring out how to unify the Java service-based architecture that had begun to spiral out from the original Rails monolith. An API, a "source of truth". My team was made up of slightly more experienced engineers all based out of our Dublin office (a recently-discovered tax haven for US startups), a manager from America who had moved there some years ago ahead of the curve, and me, the dummy at… More