For a few years I was obsessed with how I looked and how I was perceived. I trained all the time and made it my personality: the gym, the mirror, the way a room read me.
In 2023 it ended. I was with a partner who abused me. She drugged me without my consent and made me think I was crazy. When my family got me out of it I stopped training, and the person in the photo went with it. I think what dropped was a mask: that version of me was built to be seen a certain way, and I no longer had it in me to keep it up.
Two years went by like that, and I rebuilt slowly. I ran the back office of a solar company, read a hundred classics in a year, and read the news on community radio on the side. Quieter, and not unhappy.
Then, in July 2025, my thyroid went wrong, suddenly. My levels were abnormal: I was eating 3,000 calories a day and lost 20 kg in a month and a half. The headaches came with it, the splitting kind. Around 23 July I crashed my car. I stumbled into bed and slept for two days, and when I got up I was thinking differently. It showed in my face; the second photo is two weeks later, in the hospital car park.
Within a week I had started building the Job Adder and scripting in Python. The Job Adder was a spreadsheet that read a signed solar proposal and built the job from it, and the Python scripts used it as their engine. Together they formed the first system, but it wasn't a traditional application. So I reconsidered and built the Job Adding System the company runs on today.
A week after starting the Job Adder Excel file I had a desperate urge to buy an instrument. I could suddenly hear the chords in songs, and I knew I could play them. I could play songs from memory that I had never worked out before. The music page has that story, with two songs on video.
The personality that came out of that July is fully autistic, in the way that used to be called Asperger's: I tell the truth, always, and I don't know how to do otherwise.
The person I am today plans better and thinks more abstractly. I'm not ashamed of who I used to be. I'm proud of the journey, and I'm grateful to enjoy the ride, because I can see where it's going: Software Cowboy's first product is built and not yet announced, and the system that started as a spreadsheet is moving into containers and Postgres.