Tell us about it! Inquiring minds want to know... =)
When my parents come to visit us, I know how proud they are and I'm proud that I didn't squander the opportunity that they worked so hard to give us.
I'm not sure what my kids will do but I intend to instill the same values of education, working harder than anyone else, and having good values into them.
I presume you know other people with your background that haven't managed to achieve this, do you have any insight into what the differences are?
Innate abilities? specific values? good luck? - I can imagine the general differences, but the specifics are really interesting to me.
Instead I picked up a paintbrush, got a night job at a hotel and now I oil paint for 5-6 hours out of my day. I'm exercising, talking to friends, being social. And just like my terrible paintings, my other skills are improving.
I did have a close second though, a little project called Samsara that brought zero-click downloading to iTunes. Once set up, getting new music is as easy as plugging in your iDevice. It is written in Go, binds Last.FM, TPB and Transmission together and runs a daemon. The gist of the program is that it grabs your recommended music, scrapes TPB for it, Downloads it, Shovels it into your iTunes library, and auto-syncs it with your devices over wifi. It's been running for the past few months with no errors, and my music is fresh. Even has an option to constrain the downloads to releases in the past two years. InstaHipster.
I never got around to packaging it up as it was the last real project I was working on. Just trying to find drive to work on it was a pain. If anyone wants the code, send an email to zeropointer@icloud.com , If someone wants to take the project off my hands and polish it up properly and release it. It's all yours.
Although the sheepskin, title, and bound book are neat, the real prize is the dissertation. After years of struggling with the unknown, I teased out from nature a small secret that no one else in the world knew. Telling that story through the dissertation (and defending it!) was a life-changing experience.
I will always be grateful for my boss for taking a chance on me, which is why all the bullshit, risk-averse "hiring process" discussions always get to me. I try to give people the same break I got, and it's surprising how often it works.
Personal: Managing to keep my bipolar in check (more or less) and be happy. I have a girlfriend who means the world to me; few things can match up to that.
Career: Discovering and disclosing the Onity hotel lock vulnerability. The remediation of that bug may have legitimately saved lives; it's certainly saved property.
The bug existed for nearly 20 years, affecting over 4 million hotel rooms. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they knew about this vulnerability at least 10 years prior to my disclosure, having seen proof of that (in the form of a diagnostics device for dumping the memory of the locks, produced by TESA, the precursor to Onity). I've never seen proof that it was known before then, but given the nature of the bug, I'd be amazed if this wasn't known when the protocol was designed.
In short, this was the only way that I knew to guarantee that people would be made aware of this bug. Three years later, I couldn't be more confident that I made the right decision.
Accomplishments I've enjoyed on hindsight– getting my band on a pretty established local stage, doing standup comedy and getting a great response, giving a lecture to a group of University students about ecommerce marketing (I've never been to University myself, so that felt awesome), having blogposts I've written get to the frontpage of HN and widely shared on Medium, etc.
But mostly– earning the respect of people I respect. It's an ongoing process, of course, but probably the most fulfilling.
Career wise, I'm currently working on Cachet (https://cachethq.io) and am blown away by being able to provide software that thousands of people actively use.
Although it may seem silly, I stopped a small, young lad from being picked on by some bigger lads. They were hitting him and calling him names. It hit home because I remember being in the exact same situation and nobody helped me. I got out of my car, told them to leave him alone and took him home in the car, which I didn't think anything of until afterwards.
After years of skirting close to poverty and receiving no help from either of our families, and coming out more educated and wealthy than anybody in my family history, through nothing but determination, hard work and a few sprinkles of luck. I now own a great home, in a fantastic neighborhood, am almost debt free (house and all). But being able to also enjoy life at the same time, to follow some of my passions, travel, enjoy food and art and wine.
I've now found myself in a position where I've done the career, and I'm backing off a bit to relax, learn and enjoy pure simple work for a change.
The life I live in now has exceeded any possible life I ever expected to live as a child. I'm incredibly proud of it.
In terms of my day job IT Fixing a 2 mill shortfall for BT and Finding a bug that was costing total jobs 1/2 a mill a week.
Before the age of 22, I earned my freedom, and discovered what I truly love in life.
I have told several others about the way I run my business now and everyone reponded very positive (7 companies are running using the method) so of course I am turning it into a business at www.timeblock.com
A note: your email address signup form doesn't appear with AdBlock on. I had to open an incognito tab to sign up. (http://timeblock.com/sign-up/)
Finally, I'm digging the innovation coming out of the Nordic countries. Had the pleasure of studying abroad in Sweden last year and took quite a few trips to Copenhagen.
It is strange about the adblock!
If you are ever in Copenhagen, ping me and I'll offer you a cup of coffee!
I grew up in a very small town in the US with not a lot of opportunity and lucked into getting hired by an information security firm in a bigger city back when many companies had never heard of firewalls. I had close tech savvy friends from back home that were struggling and was able to convince my employer to hire them.
Since then, they've become very successful in their own right. Yes, they are very smart and have worked hard, but knowing what I do now about the power of networking and getting the right opportunity at the right time, I like to think that how I was able to help them made a huge difference in how their lives turned out.
2) Teaching myself programming (LAMP). Not because it was a major accomplishment, but simply because it taught me everything else can be learnt, from Economics to Philosophy to Arts to Biology to Quantum Mechanics.
Right now: How far we have gotten with Realty Africa, a property crowdfunding platform dedicated to Sub-Saharan Africa. The response we have gotten on the ground has taken us completely by surprise and the potential market is massive. (Shameless plug: we are raising the final money for our startup costs at http://igg.me/at/PCA)
Software: reverie/CMS. Currently at the end of a rewrite, but I'm fairly pleased with how far it's gotten. Writing a cache manager is a serious puzzle though! (https://github.com/emil0r/reverie)
Family: My wife. She's amazing :)
I didn't make the smartest choices when I was young(er), but I turned that around, found a career, ended up co-founding a company and making a cool game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nethernet) then started a new company to help people figure out wtf they can do with their lives (https://www.somewhere.com).
Saying that though, the stupid robots I built, the side-projects and the articles in Hack Circus mean just as much.
Of course, pride comes before a fall so, yeah, cheers.... ;)
I mentioned this as my "hack" in one of my YC applications and the few who reviewed my app (prior to formal application) all said, "oh this is a known trick. it has been used before". Anyways, I am still happy and proud that took the plunge, did my masters and I am better for it.
We owned a shop where me and my younger brother used to help my mom during weekends. With that experience, we ran the shop and took care of the hospital and living expenses. That's one accomplishment I am proud of till this day.
With the above in mind, I guess I'm currently most proud of my decision last year to become freelancer. I feel as a freelancer it will be easier for me to reach my goals in producing some great software in the future.
Happiness is the ultimate goal. To achieve it, all areas of your life must be positively aligned. Even if luck might have an important role in some of these "positive alignments", is improbable that luck is taking care of all of them. So, it means that, at least, you must be doing some things really well.