Work

The Gate I Built

I’ve spent a working life just outside the rooms where work gets anointed. Not entirely outside — I wrote tech books that went out under Sams and O’Reilly imprints , among others, and built apps that shipped under other companies’ logos, CNN and Xfinity among them. I was in those rooms often enough. I just paid a toll at the door every time, and the thing that vouched for the work was never me. It was the imprint on the spine, the logo on the app. That’s most of the truth about me. Here’s the part I’m least comfortable with: for about four years, I helped build one of those gates myself. And the thing making it look ridiculous now is a different machine — one that does for free the exact trick my gate was built to measure.