Rejected bio.

_posts/2011-05-03-rejected-bio-from-the-setup.md

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+title: Rejected Bio from The Setup
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+<p class="meta">03 May 2011 - San Francisco</p>
+
+Yesterday, [the autobiographical post I wrote for The
+Setup](http://tom.preston-werner.usesthis.com/) went live. I wrote that post
+over a year ago and then entered into an epic battle with
+[@waferbaby](http://twitter.com/#!/waferbaby) about the length of my "Who are
+you, and what do you do?" section. He said it was too long. I said it could
+not be shortened. And so the post sat for a year, collecting dust, neither of
+us prepared to back down.
+
+About a month ago I decided that it was foolish to let the words I had written rot on my hard drive and so I did the only thing I knew how to do: overreact. So I cut the original nine-hundred words of my bio down to fourteen words and resubmitted it to Daniel. Those are the words you see in the post now.
+
+For your pleasure, here is the original bio in its full, unabridged glory.
+
+<hr />
+
+My name is Tom Preston-Werner. I find that the hyphenated last name
+makes me sound distinguished and worth listening to. I grew up three
+decades ago in a small city in Iowa along the Mississippi, which means
+I shucked a lot of corn and know exactly how many mosquitos will land
+on your arm should you hold it still for ten minutes at dusk on the
+muggiest day of the summer. As an aspiring theoretical particle
+physicist, I worked my way through entire shelves of scientific
+literature from the public library, desperately wanting to understand
+the bewildering mathematics that littered the pages like so many
+leaves on the bottom of that morning's cup of green tea. I searched in
+vain for instructors or classmates that could provide me with the
+insight necessary to comprehend the true meaning of Heisenberg's
+Uncertainty Principle, but all I found were underpaid math teachers
+and disillusioned "students" in search of their next smoke break.
+After obsessing over US News' Best Colleges reports for months I
+finally chose and was accepted to Harvey Mudd, a tiny engineering
+school in California famous for assigning the greatest number of hours
+of homework per night. This sounded just perfect to me. Finally a
+place I could bring up the EPR Paradox and not be immediately
+stigmatized as "that science weirdo with the hilariously thick glasses
+and unfortunate hairdo."
+
+Mudd did not disappoint. But now I had the opposite problem. In order
+to properly understand particle physics, you must have a deep and
+profound love of math. You have to be so comfortable with abstract
+concepts that even Picasso would be jealous. Ironically, in order to
+grasp the fundamental reality of our universe, you must forget about
+the "reality" of everyday life and start living in a world comprised
+of eigenvectors, Hilbert spaces, and Planck's constant. This was a
+leap I could not make. I like math, but I'm too easily distracted by
+macroscopic reality to make it my profession.
+
+Once I accepted that I would never spend late nights pouring over
+bubble chamber printouts at Fermilab, it became obvious that I was
+destined to enter computer science. I started programming in BASIC on
+a TRS-80 that my dad bought from Radio Shack when I was 8 years old.
+Since then, I'd learned to love the discipline and creativity involved
+in making a machine do my bidding. It was like having a super-obedient
+but annoyingly logical little brother. He'll do anything you want as
+long as you tell him in precise and unambiguous language. The best
+thing is, the feedback is immediate. In physics, it can take twenty
+years to prove that a single esoteric particle even exists. When
+you're writing a program that displays the number of electrons in each
+of the shells around the nucleus of every element, the feedback is
+immediate and intoxicating. With just a few keystrokes, the world is
+changed forever. Try to get that kind of rush even once in a lifetime
+as a theoretical particle physicist. I dare you.
+
+In 1999, after two years of college, I dropped out of Harvey Mudd to
+join a startup with some friends that were graduating. It was the end
+of the first dot-com bubble and I thought I could strike it rich,
+right then and there. Sadly, like so many startups of the day, we
+never accomplished what we envisioned and I ended up bouncing between
+jobs and consulting gigs for six years until I found myself in San
+Francisco. If Harvey Mudd was my mecca for physicists, then San
+Francisco was my mecca for programmers. Where else can you be grabbing
+lunch at a taqueria and overhear a group at the next table discussing
+the finer points of optimizing C code to run on an embedded processor?
+
+I moved to San Francisco to take a job as a Ruby developer with a
+Wikipedia search engine called Powerset. I also began attending Ruby
+meetups and drinking with local software developers. There are a lot
+of talented people in the Bay Area and I wanted to meet them all.
+Within the Ruby community, a distributed version control system called
+Git was starting to get some attention. It was a really cool way of
+working with other people on code, but there wasn't an easy way to get
+up and running with a group of developers. Along with cofounders Chris
+Wanstrath and PJ Hyett (who I met at the Ruby meetups) I started a
+company called GitHub that would address this problem and make it dead
+simple to share Git repositories and collaborate on code with other
+developers.
+
+At first, we worked on GitHub on the side, putting in time on evenings
+and weekends. After six months we launched the site to the public and
+started charging. Not long after that, Powerset was acquired by
+Microsoft and I was faced with a choice: stay on as a Microsoft
+employee with a big retention bonus and give up GitHub or turn down
+the Microsoft money and quit Powerset to work on GitHub full-time. You
+can read more about this saga in my blog post entitled [How I Turned
+Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on
+GitHub](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/18/how-i-turned-down-300k.html).
+I think I made the right decision.
+
+Today GitHub has ten employees and more than 730,000 users with over
+2,000,000 repositories. We're growing fast, and I'm having the time of
+my life!