I got an Atari 400 for Christmas when I was six. It came with a few games, and I played the heck out of those games, but the two most exciting cartridges were PILOT and BASIC. The games, while fun, were walled gardens. PILOT and BASIC were a bucket of legos that I could make whatever I wanted with.

This urge (and sometimes rage) to build for me has always been associated with mornings. I feel it today, all these years later, when I go to a coffee shop. The coffee wasn't there when I was six. But that beginning of the day sense of anything being possible if I just buckle down to it, it was with me when breakfast was a bowlful of sugar drowned in milk, and it's with me today when breakfast is a shot of espresso.

I few people have asked me why, in 2016, have I come an Individual Contributor (IC) for really the first time in my career. This is why: the tools we have today, especially the (a) maturity of Node.js (b) the settling on React as the primary front-end framework (c) cloud computing, have made programming feel like it felt when I first got my head around BASIC on that Atari.

Like each day begins with anything being possible.