I graduated from university with a Bachelor of Arts in History - HOW did I end up working in tech at WebLogic - one of the first Java application developers and the first company to introduce a Java-based application server and then at Amazon for the past 19 years?
While someone’s life might look planned and perfect when they reach some level of achievement or success - the journey is not usually straight forward or linear. There are a lot of bumps along the way. I believe hustle and curiosity have been my key attributes to my success.
The Story
I went to college at Brigham Young University - I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in History. I got married in June of 1989 (to my wonderful wife Stacey) after one semester of college and in Jan of 1993 - we had finally reached “rock bottom” financially and we moved to Logan to live with my in-laws while I got a full time job and attempted to finish up my degree via independent study. I was doing virtual school long before Covid…. In June of 1993 - my wife and our 1 year old daughter Kiah moved to Taiwan to teach English, study Chinese and keep working on my degree via independent study. Future plans were not very solid - and we were not on a guaranteed path by most estimations. I scraped through my last statistics class in Taiwan with a lot of help from a member of our local church in Taitung and got my degree awarded in History from BYU in August of 1993. I did not walk in a graduation ceremony; there was no pomp - due to circumstances of living in Taiwan - there was not even a transition due to no rite of passage.
We applied from Taiwan to graduate school in the fall of 1993, in February we moved back to Logan to be with Stac’s mom - and we waited for graduate school application results. I got a job working at dry cleaners in Park City Utah and we were uncertain about which path to take next for my career. I thought about and strongly considered joining the military - but (thankfully?) that did not work out. In September we moved back to Provo and I started a graduate program in Asian Studies - with an emphasis on modern China. While a student (course work only took one year) - I had a teaching assistant job at 10 hours a week helping undergraduate survey history courses and I got an additional teaching assistant job in the summer to Dr. Hamblin - who had me help him with research. That wasn’t enough to keep our little family above the student poverty line and I also got a job working part time at Nu Skin International.
This was pre-internet. Computers existed - but they didn’t talk to each other via an open network. At home your computer was a desktop (this was before the computer components were small enough to fit into a laptop) and you would load software via floppy disks; you would store documents on floppy disks and you would print papers by taking a copy of your floppy disk to a computer center and loading your paper and print from there. Computers were also used in business - but they only had a local network - that is a bunch of computers were connected via a network of wires to a “big central computer” that was stored on premise - usually in a mainframe, or a mid-range set of computers like an IBM AS/400.
What the internet did was provide a “public” way of networking all computers together. In the days before the internet the only “online” way to order things was by having a paper catalog and calling an ordering call center and placing your order over the phone. At Nu Skin - I would get connected to a customer on the phone - I had a computer terminal - that was connected to a local server - I would login to a terminal “green screen” (the text was literally green on black) - we would authenticate the customer and look up their account and then I would manually key in order data that would get submitted to the local server and then batch processed to the warehouse, printed out on paper, where someone would put together the order and mail it out to customers.
When I started graduate school in fall of 1994 - the internet was “out there” (it started as ARPANET at 4 universities in 1969) - but it had started mainly by connecting universities - and their big mainframe computer systems together. Most of the applications were text/terminal based - like Gopher - which was all text based; There was one “online” community : American OnLine (AOL) that had applications with a UI that allowed people to connect their home computers to a “central” computer via AOL software over a phone line to chat, send emails and even post messages. But these were closed systems that required AOL membership, and AOL software to get “online”. The big revolution was the World Wide Web - WWW - which proposed a new set of applications and open protocols for connecting computers and sharing information in a graphical format. This “web” of hyperlinked websites and documents could be browsed by an application called a Web Browser - the first browser (Mosaic) was written at university in 1993 - but some of those members (Marc Andreeson) formed a public company and the first public browser was released in Dec of 1994 - Netscape Navigator. This revolutionized the existing internet - at university I could now use a browser which had a graphical UI to access websites, look up information, see pictures etc. All I had to do was click on links. At home I could now dial into AOL - and start a web browser and access the World Wide Web.
This transformation of the internet not only swept across the world creating the .com boom - but also changed my then two jobs. Dr. Hamblin suddenly wanted me to build him a history website - he wanted me to build a series of maps that showed the progression of the Assyrian Empire. So I started learning HTML - how to “code” HTML pages, I started talking to the university IT guys about port :8080 and what /cgi-bin was.
At work - Nu Skin - was itself transforming its computer systems. First they were upgrading from a PICK based software system to SAP. A set of consultants were helping with the SAP implementation - and they needed someone to map out the order process flow as requirements for SAP. So I volunteered as someone who took orders to learn a drawing/outline program called Visio - to build order processing flow diagrams. I then got a full time job inside Nu Skin to work in their information systems - they had an internal team that helped with product knowledge base. As the .com craze swept industries - Nu Skin decided in 1996 that they wanted to build an online website where customers could place orders - replace the phone based call center with the world wide web. Everyone by this time was building commerce websites - where you could buy things.
Nu Skin hired consultants : Synapse Group out of Texas to help build the website. As someone who had done ordering requirements for SAP - I was there to help define requirements for the website. I started learning about how to help support the website as it was built. We had to install an Oracle database - and build synchronization jobs to copy the data out of and back into Nu Skin’s mainframe system. We bought and installed a Netscape Commerce Server - which had enhanced security protocols - Secure Sockets Layer (SSL - the s in https - which has now been superseded by TLS) - this encrypted data using RSA so you could share credit cards over the internet without allowing hackers to steal the information. I was responsible for figuring out to how to get a Domain Name registered and then how to get an SSL certificate from Verisign and install and configure them in Netscape Commerce Server (NCS) so we could support SSL. The Netscape server allowed you to run custom software using the Netscape API (NSAPI) - and you could run Java programs (a then new programming language that was very popular in Internet companies for ease of development and maintenance). For the website to work the Netscape Commerce Server had to connect to the Oracle database to retrieve data and store data. The java tech for connecting to data based was Java Database Connections (JDBC). At the time NSAPI didn’t let the Java stack load C++ native code - so to connect to Oracle we had to use an intermediary server to make a 3 tier JDBC connection. This was a 3 way connection between NSAP/JDBC → WebLogic Server→ Oracle - and that is how Nu Skin came to purchase licenses for WebLogic application server and their 3 tier JDBC software.
When the Nu Skin website first launched - I had an official role supporting the website. Every morning I would have to login into NCS and look up the credit card transactions for all the orders placed the day before. Then I would call some guy with a credit card processing company in North Carolina - and he would login to his Unix terminal and “settle” or finalize the credit card transactions, and push the money into Nu Skin. I also was in charge of the WebLogic server - and I remember spending hours sitting in the air conditioned server room at Nu Skin - staring at the computer terminal where the WebLogic server was running - on the phone with WebLogic Support in San Francisco trying to figure out why the website and the WebLogic server was so slow. This is the first time I remember learning about Java’s heap space and garbage collection.
The Synapse Group offered to teach us basic intro to Java programming class - and I took classes and I remember doing “homework” at night - downloading the JDK, using emacs (because that is what James David Duncanson our teacher from Synapse Group used) to write my first HelloWorld programs and being excited to be able to type :
// This is a simple Java program.
// FileName : "HelloWorld.java".
class HelloWorld {
// Your program begins with a call to main().
// Prints "Hello, World" to the terminal window.
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello, World");
}
}
Then to compile and run the program :
C:\>javac HelloWorld. java
C: \>java HelloWorld
Hello, World
C: \>
Pretty exciting to learn how to “create” something in code, compile it so the computer could understand it and then run it and have it produce output.
My curiosity kept growing and I kept learning. I eventually started supporting the website software bugs - trying to figure out why a web page was broken or not working. I had all the java code that Synapse has written and I remember staying up all night debugging why something was broken and being so excited to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. I eventually started writing new software at Nu Skin - and building new websites and new functionality and features - I remember building a website to calculate your BMI based on inputs. Eventually in 1997 Nu Skin promoted me to a full fledged software engineer and gave me a substantial pay raise.
By this time Nu Skin was also using a bunch of the WebLogic Servers features - and I had spent many hours with the WebLogic sales team, the sales engineers and even met Bob Pasker one of the founders of WebLogic when he accompanied WebLogic on sales calls. The WebLogic Sales Engineer - Gordon Augat - encouraged me to apply for a job at WebLogic. I knew that they had some of the very best and the brightest Java software engineers - and that there was no way I would compare and that I’d have to start out at the bottom. So I applied for a Developer Relations Engineer (DRE) position - where I would be the guy in WebLogic support on the other end of the phone. WebLogic flew me out to San Francisco for an interview - at the time Nu Skin required everyone to wear a white shirt and tie to work every day. So I showed up to WebLogic in a shirt and tie - no one else in the entire company was dressed as formal as me! I was way out of place. I interviewed with Bob Pasker and several other people. Bob was the chief architect - and he also graduated in history. I remember being nervous - but things must have gone ok - because I got a job offer to work as a DRE.
At the time - I didn’t know anything about jobs - getting new jobs or changing jobs. I didn’t know you could ask for a relocation package - I don’t even know if WebLogic offered one. But I didn’t ask, and they didn’t offer. So I had to pay for my plane tickets to fly back and forth and to pay for moving the family out to the bay area from Utah. Because of expense, I flew alone to San Francisco to look for apartments without Stacey - Gordon drove me around and I found a place in Pleasant Hill near the BART line where I could commute into the city. And then I ended up flying out to start my new job for a few weeks while Stacey was still back in Utah with Kiah. I had no where to stay. So I spent the first couple of nights at a youth hostel in Fort Mason. Stacey’s uncle let me stay with him for a couple of nights, Bob Pasker let me stay at his house for a couple of nights and then I spent about a week at a co-worker Todd Karakashian’s apartment when he and his partner went on vacation.
Then I flew back to Utah and we packed and loaded the moving truck and my brother Jon helped us drive out to San Francisco. I remember when we got to the bay area - I dropped off Jon in the city with $20 to get to the airport and fly home. Stac and I went to the apartment - where along with a couple of church members unloaded the truck. Stacey was not super impressed with our apartment - we were downsizing from a house - there was no grass or trees - and we were right next to a Wendy’s - you could hear people ordering at the drive thru. But there was a swimming pool and we had a lot of young couples in the same spot as us - all working for bay area internet companies - trying our hands at the new frontier.
At WebLogic - when I started in support - I volunteered to take on all the things that no one else wanted to tackle - I took over security tickets - since I’d spent time with SSL and certificates already - and I also volunteered for all the new projects and features like clustering. And eventually I became backline support - the guy they’d fly on planes at midnight to Georgia to visit IBM, or to New York City to work on some implementation issues with Lehman Brothers or to British Airways in London to debug a server deadlock issue. 6 months later WebLogic was acquired by BEA Systems, which I stayed with for another 6 years. I moved from backline (CCE) engineering into supporting the CTO office on higher profile strategic deals and then I moved into software development working on usability and configuration and management features. And then Stac and I got tired of California and I moved with BEA Systems to Seattle in April of 2004 to run the Program Management team for a division of BEA that built Java development tools. After coming back from my first back packing trip in August of 2004 - I got a voice mail saying BEA had announced they were shutting down the Seattle office. People started leaving in droves - and in February of 2005 - I interviewed at Amazon - got a job offer and started 10 days later.
I joined as a level 6 TPM - working for Andrew Certain - working on a new program at Amazon called Self Fulfillment and Ordering Services - SSOF -> which quickly turned into Fulfillment By Amazon -> FBA. And that is how I as a history major ended up working in tech at WebLogic and Amazon. And the rest as they say is history and is still being written.