I think there's only about five friends from high school that I still keep irregular contact with, and even fewer friends from college. So if you've somehow been looking for Belden Lyman, and if I happen to be that guy- here's my story.
High school. I barely remember it. Shoutout to Lisa Nemer, my Spanish teacher for 3 years. I send her postcards whenever I leave the country: something about travelling abroad reminds me of her.
College. Freshman year in New Mexico, then a transfer to Moorhead. I fumbled around with various degrees: Criminal Justice; Elementary Education; Anthropolgy; Sociology. I always paired this with "and Spanish", since Nemer always told us that just by graduating from her Spanish program, we were already halfway to a Spanish major. She was right.
Funnily, my college let students take Introduction to Chinese Language as a substitute for a math credit. Starting in fifth grade I began disliking math, so the choice here was easy. I took Chinese for three years, then took a year off college to teach English and study Mandarin in southern China. I met a fellow student there, who also had two years of college left. We traveled together, and apparently fell in love.
I returned to college, finished two years in one, and moved to the Bay Area in California. An aunt put me up in her basement for a while. One day she shopped my resume around at work, which got me an interview at Innovative Interfaces, Inc.
Meanwhile, the gal I'd met in China finished her last year of college, then returned back home to the Bay Area. Her employer sent her to an introductory Perl programming class at UC Berkeley Extension. I decided that it would be fun to sit next to my girlfriend on the company dime, so convinced my manager that some introductory programming classes were just what I needed to succeed in my job.
I was working in QA at the time, and the QA workcycle went through boom and bust periods. We were in a bust period, so I amused myself by writing tools to examine the translation files that Innovative's software used.
V and I got married. She went back to school full-time to study animation at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I bounced around between different departments at Innovative for the next 4 years, writing more tools and improving as a programmer. I was active on Perlmonks at this time- partly because I still needed to look outside my peers to grow as a programmer, and partly because I had a lot of slack time in my schedule.
Eventually I found a job posting on Craig's List that was exactly what I needed: a startup looking for a Perl developer. They didn't care whether I had a degree in computer science- they just wanted me to submit some code to solve some sample problems they posted.
I interviewed, and AirWave hired me. After I'd been there for two years, V got a job offer with an animation studio located in New York state. We moved, and for some reason my manager kept me on. A few months later that reason became clear: AirWave was purchased by Aruba Networks.
So we've been here in White Plains, NY since 2007. And I still work for the same team that hired me, doing the same work that I enjoy.
Now that I've got the dry recitation of my profersonal timeline out of the way, maybe I'll be able to post something more interesting.
Thanks for reading. Eleven years in eleven paragraphs: whew.
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