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# [Being Raised by the Internet](https://jimmyhmiller.github.io/raised)

- [Computers]()
- [The Kindness of Strangers]()
- [The Impact of Being Open]()

I grew up relatively poor. I was fortunate enough to have a roof over my head, clean water, electricity, a computer, internet, and cable tv. But food was often harder to come by. This may seem like a contradiction, but when your mom has left to marry her uncle and your dad has schizophrenia, you aren’t really in charge of how the money is spent.

Starting at the age of 12, I was given $20 a week for my food. (If it was a good week. Otherwise it might $10 or even $0). During the school year that meant I just had to make that stretch for dinner and the weekends — I had free school lunch. But in the summer, that made things quite a bit harder. One week, I had only a few jars of sprinkles left in the top of our pantry.

When I did have money for food, I had to buy it. Luckily there were a few restaurants and a large grocery store about a half-mile walk away. I still remember the first time I made that trip alone. It was snowing, I didn't have a heavy coat and my brother didn't want to go with me. I was scared, but eventually gave into the hunger and went and bought something at the grocery store. From then on I found a new freedom.

I didn't know how to cook so my meals at home largely consisted of ramen and Velvetta queso and chips. Two bags of tortilla chips, a jar of salsa, and a brick of velvetta cost $10. So that would usually be about half my week's worth of food. Craving something else, I would often go to the local Qdoba and get a burrito. At $6.35 it wasn't a great spend of my money. But sometimes the employees there would give me the employee discount, I guess they realized I needed it. If I really wanted to feel full and have something tasty, I'd get a large fry at the Penn Station for $3.75. A full belly was a great feeling.

## Computers

Computers became my outlet away from all of this. In an effort to have more computer time to himself, my brother found a computer out by the dumpster, brought it in, and told me it was my computer now. I knew very little about computers at the time but I knew two things 1) I needed a wireless card. 2) I needed to get Windows ME off this thing (I didn't know any of the passwords for the accounts). Luckily a kid at school and some people at church had mentioned Linux. I burned CDs for Fedora, CDs for Suse, but I couldn't get either of them working. Then I learned about Ubuntu and their live CD. I got it working!

But the internet didn't work even after I installed my wireless card. Little did I know, that I had stumbled into a classic blunder, linux and wireless cards. After a lot of googling, I figured out I could install this thing called ndiswrapper. Problem, I had no internet. So after many CDs burned resolving the dependency tree to compile ndiswrapper (I had no idea what I was doing), I got it working!

I was hooked. Computers became my escape. I spent so much time tinkering. Countless hours on things like hackthissite.org and projecteuler.net. I would learn new languages, build pointless projects, configure my Linux install, trying for the 100th time to get xgl working seamlessly. Computers were the distraction I needed away from my day-to-day life.

## The Kindness of Strangers

I never thought I'd amount to much in life. I never imagined having a job that paid well. I definitely never imagined this little hobby I had as a kid would give me so much.

When I look back and think about those times, I'm amazed but how much I owe to people who I never met. People who never met me, never heard of me. People whose work was not aimed at me in the slightest. I am where I am today thanks to people's willingness to share their work openly. The free tutorials I followed on the internet, the open source software I read, the open source software I used, tech news, resources like w3schools, random tech blogs, all formed the backbone of my education. They all taught me the skills I needed to escape the poverty I grew up in.

These random strangers gave me the confidence I needed. They showed me things I couldn't have learned in school. They set me up to succeed in life. They raised me.

## The Impact of Being Open

I am forever indebted to these people. They weren't all famous people, nor successful people. Some of them had companies that failed. Some of their blogs were obscure and lost to time. (I doubt I will ever find the tutorial for making a website in flash+php+xml+mysql that I once followed). I'm sure some of them felt like failures. Perhaps they didn't get rich like they hoped, or popular, or never succeeded in changing the world. But they all had one thing in common, they decided to openly and freely share their work.

They may not have set out to share out of altrusitic motivations. I am certain they never intended to inspire a 12 year-old kid to find a better life. But it doesn't matter their motivations. They changed my life. All I can say is thank you. Thank you for sharing your work. Thank you for your blogs posts, your tutorials, thank you for your slashdot comments, for your posts on digg. No matter how small your contribution, it mattered to me. You changed my life. Thank you.
