I had to come up with a system to make sure I “got around” to the less fun things.

My last job introduced me to the free bug/task tracking software package called Mantis. I still use that for a lot of collaborative things I do with other people since I have my own instance installed and can share projects among different people. The other tool I use for less software-oriented or detailed tasks is Wunderlist. That’s something I use for remembering to mail my rent check or something similar and I’m a big fan because I have the app on my work computer, home computer and my phone, so I can keep track of things very easily.

Say I’m in a meeting or out with friends and have an idea or want to remember things, I used to carry notecards around, but I often lost them or would forget them. I don’t forget my phone, so I can just enter it there, at least as a reminder to add to Mantis, or take care of when I get around to it. With so many things flying around between work, independent projects, family, friends, the Village Lions and my hero dog Rugby, there’s a lot to remember, so I’m still working on the best system, but this is the one I have so far.

Design and Usability Changes and Updates

• Larger Video Player - This is the first thing that anyone will notice when coming to a video. The player dominates the screen regardless of screen size and acknowledges that the user is there to watch a video.
• Advanced Social Integration - By making use of Facebook, we’re able to tell your friends when you’ve watched a video, share a video with them easily by dragging it to them and seeing your friends playlists. In addition, we create playlists for you based on the music you’ve liked on Facebook and your iTunes library.
• Simpler Homepage - The homepage, instead of having a carousel of images and links at the top with a variety of content below, we have one large carousel that really shows the visitor what the highlighted pieces of content are and what’s new at VEVO.
• Dynamic Resizing - The entire site fits the browser on every page, using more real estate on the screen and ensuring that the content (video) is truly highlighted.
• Persistent Navigation and Header - The navigation on the left, the header on the top and the footer are persistent and fixed throughout the site so a user can see their friends and playlists much more easily and search for a video quickly without needing to scroll.
• Continuous Play - When a user watches a video, we always have a new video to show them after that one finishes. This is a seamless experience for the user and also allows for them to enjoy the music videos without needing to really work to find videos that they’ll like.
• Removing Search Results Page - This sounds like it would be a bad idea, however, it improves the likelihood of a good experience. When a user searches for “Lady Gaga” but mistypes “Ladt Gaga” they, based on their experience on Google and elsewhere, expect to be corrected or brought to the right place anyway. VEVO, however, doesn’t have the resources or manpower to spend time on creating such advanced search algorithms, so we instead used only lookahead search, then a user quickly sees that they mistyped and corrects themselves, getting the results they want right in front of them.

Technical Improvements

• Using HTML5 Pushstate - By using the HTML5 pushstate on the playlist and video pages, we’re able to quickly show new content on the video page and decrease load time and increase overall performance, experience and decrease the number of HTTP requests.
• Local Caching - By caching artist, video and friend information on a user’s local machine, that means fewer data requests to our servers and much faster speeds on each additional page, meaning that the user gets a faster and faster experience as they go from video to video.
• Improved Recommendation System - By leveraging Echonest and their recommendation system, we’re able to give a user many, many more videos that are far more applicable to exactly what they are looking for, making the continuous play mentioned above all that more memorable and compelling.
• Cached Pages - By making all user-based calls come after the page loads via JavaScript, that means we can use extensive caching on most pages and modify the pages once the page has started loading on the user’s end.
• JavaScript and CSS Bundling - While previous versions of VEVO had this in a sense, there was often repeated JavaScript or CSS or multiple calls to different bundles on different pages. In addition, the system we used was hard to manage or tweak and couldn’t be debugged or adjusted on the fly. The new system combines all JavaScript and CSS files into two large bundles that are the same on every page, making it fast and simple, with an option to turn it off if debugging is needed and a switch to regenerate the CSS or JavaScript bundles on the fly.
• Facebook Integration - We were able to heavily leverage Facebook to get information about users of the site, including friends and music likes to greatly personalize the website.
• iTunes Scanning - We used a Java Applet to allow users to scan their iTunes library and create a playlist based on the artists they have in their library. This was one feature that really got some oohs and aahs and showed people some of the more unknown videos we have in our catalog.

Process Experiences and Lessons Learned

• Scope Creep - The bane of all projects, large and small is scope creep. While we did limit it in some ways during the project, pushing things back saying we could add or improve them post-beta, that wasn’t always the case. Especially when we were near the end of the project, the final 10% of work seemed to drag on and on with small, and large, additional changes.
• Time Management - While you always try to plan to have time to tweak features and eliminate bugs, the reality is that you can never plan enough time for that. Again, that last 10% usually takes the most work and there’s nothing like having more time to handle that and not needing to scramble.
• Chaos Versus Agile - While VEVO touts using an agile process, the beta version was given such a short deadline and so many things to accomplish and change that that process started to break down. Tasks were lost along the way or never assigned to developers or designers, so it wasn’t clear who was assigned what as well as what the status was on a given feature, design or bugfix.
• Running on Empty - Given that it was a big project with a small team, people were running at their top performance for quite some time. While this can be good for short times, doing it for two or three months discourages people and hurts motivation as well as quality of work due to overwork and general tiredness. In addition, the ideal of doing things fast tends to hurt the ideal of doing things right, so the final stages, often the most crucial, are filled with the most mistakes. Combine this with scope creep and you are left with a frustrated team in general.
• Beta Means Beta - While I appreciate perfect, often “done” is better. And there should be a criteria for “done.” This eliminates scope creep, gets things rolled out on time and encourages agile development. We aren’t releasing a magazine, newspaper or book – we can always add more features, fix more bugs or improve performance later and start getting user feedback and information sooner.

It was a fun and exciting, while stressful, project to be a part of and I’m looking forward to its reception in the coming days, weeks and months. I’m sure it will be mixed and that there will be both positive and negative reviews, but I’m proud of what the team has accomplished in the time we were given and I’m proud that we were able to change how video sites work and able to make an impact as the second largest video site in the United States.

One thing in particular was the dismissive tone. It was never really considered from an engineering standpoint of an engineer. Certainly it sounds like a pie-in-the-sky idea at first, but when someone does some research they find it’s not as far-fetched as they originally thought. The idea that is costs “kazillion zillions” is entirely fictitious. At least do some research and use real numbers.

The real pricetag is between $8 billion and $20 billion, or .2-.5% of the 2012 US federal expenditure, which you can compare to NASA’s 2012 budget of $19 billion.

Now, things can certainly go overbudget, it happens all the time, but even if it still costs ten times as much, the benefits outweigh the problems significantly.

In a nutshell, any writer should be far more educated on the topic and do some actual fact-checking before writing a terribly misinformed article.

And I fully understand if I sound like a space elevator fanboy, I love the idea and have read a lot of the literature on it, it’s something I get really excited abuot – I’m not quite sure how one wouldn’t.

I should note that one of the reasons I feel like I’ve been thinking about this is my new position as a Software Engineer at VEVO starts today.

I’m very excited to work in this fast-paced, exciting environment where the developers are solving problems that very few people in the world have to solve, let alone even consider. It’s music, it’s fun and it’s high-performance software where bandwidth is near the highest it can be and performance cannot be taken lightly. I’m looking forward to the new challenges, a change of pace and the new people I am going to work with and learn from.

I loved my time at Bootstrap Software – I learned a lot, had a lot of fun and made some great friends. It wasn’t an easy decision by any means and I will certainly miss them.

Here’s to looking forward to the next step in my career!

I don’t think he could be more wrong. Technology isn’t obsolete in 5 years – it’s obsolete in 1-2. It’s very fad-intensive, with quick iterations. People don’t drop out because they’re not trained in the new things coming out – it’s because they’ve burnt out trying to work while learning new things, couldn’t keep up with learning these new things or they plod along without learning new things and fall to the wayside. “Training” doesn’t happen – learning by getting thrown into the deep end does.

Also, I love how the first comment lauds Cappelli’s comment, yet is one of the things I couldn’t disagree with more in the article. The reason that there are young developers, and why companies want young, smart, driven developers is because they drive them into the ground in 5-10 years or the developers become so disillusioned by what they often feel is the stupidity or inefficiencies around them that they want to get out. Sometimes hearing, “it’s a business rule,” isn’t the most calming experience.

While personally, I do like learning new skills, techniques and adding to my knowledge base, what really excites me is being able to do something quickly, to accomplish something faster than I would have been able to before. That’s what a lot of the newer technologies that come out do for you – something that would take 10 hours now takes 1, etc. That’s why people will pay so much for developers at the cutting edge. If you can do things 10 times as efficiently, it’s a deal to pay you twice, three times or eight times as much as the guy sitting next to you.

This thinking reminds me of a recent video where Matt Damon discusses teachers, their compensation and the fiery issues that are currently surrounding that sector. The comment by that professor is coming from an MBA-type analysis which loses a lot of truths by measuring only concrete facts. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but people need to acknowledge that it loses a lot of the emotional and immeasurable part of the picture in the meantime.

Just by happenstance, on the same day I read an article by Thomas L. Freidman for the NY Times about the start-up of you. Now, by combining these two articles, can we get the actual state of careers in this country.

The best way I can describe software development for me is with a list of pros and cons. So, starting with the pros:

1. Solving problems. Personally, this gives me a sense of accomplishment, at the end of the day, I can look back and point at something that I did or made or finished.
2. Alone time. I’ve found over the years, I need alone time. Otherwise, I just get to the point where I can’t take people. There’s plenty of alone time in software. This, in particular, is a pro for me, but could be a con for others.
3. Smart people. There are a fair amount of smart people in this field. People who make sense and think logically and, in general, aren’t crazy. Of course, there are some horribly awkward people, but sometimes that just makes things more fun.
4. Always something to work on. Now, this is both in terms of the job market – compared to other areas in the current economy, it’s still quite strong, and in terms of being able to play around with things outside of work and improve yourself.

Now, cons:

1. Not-so-smart people. There are, as in all areas, the less-than-smart people you have to work with. I think, however, that this is something anyone is going to run into in any field, so it’s really in the con list of having a career or job at all. However, I certainly do not have the horror stories that some people seem to have.
2. Getting bored. Personally, I get bored with a certain task or single project after a few months. If it’s the same project, but with a new twist or interesting new updates, that’s enough to keep my interest.
3. Working on uninteresting things. This is very similar to con #2, but it’s still slightly different. Generally, I tend get frustrated when I make something that no one is going to use or provides little value.

Personally, the pros, especially #1 and #2 are what really makes me love what I do. #4 is also a great thing in terms of long-term value and career, and #3 makes the day-to-day passable.

Then, in discussing where to find work, I wrote:

Generally, I’d say look for a small place, and one who’s goal is to make websites/software if you can, not just that they do have a software division to make tools to use internally. That’s not bad, but that means that you’re always going to be a coder to them, but at a place where software/websites are the goal, then you’re the MVP and everything is built around you getting your job done the quickest and best way possible. Because of this, they’re also harder to get a job at a place like this because they are in higher demand.

Great reason I’m happy to work at Bootstrap Software.

After getting my bearings and looking out the window, I quickly realized that the fire was in my building a few floors down. I quickly grabbed my dog, threw on some shoes and a jacket (my tired mind apparently thought that was important) and woke my roommate up.

I crawled across the realized we weren’t going to be able to go down the stairwell – it was a wall of smoke when I opened the door. I went back to my roommate and he had the idea of letting the firemen down below know that we were there. There was too much smoke outside his window for them to see us, so I went to go do the same from my window.

Just then, there was a tap on my shoulder, and a fireman in full equipment was there. He yelled and motioned to me to follow him and my roommate and I followed him to the fire escape. This was my first fire, so the fire escape wasn’t my first thought.

The funniest thing about the fire escape is that every other time I’ve been on one, they felt so unsafe and like I was going to easily fall off. Not this night, after the coughing from the smoke, that fire escape was one of the safest places in the world.

We climbed down the fire escape, me carrying my dog.

Then two of the only funny parts happened. When we got to the ladder at the bottom of the fire escape, there was a group of people. My roommate asked one woman, “are you okay?” To which she replied, “No,” while crying. His reply was perfect: “Well, none of us are ok, are you injured?” Which, afterward, was pretty funny to me.

The other was a fireman coming up the ladder and being near me while I’m carrying the dog and he says, “I don’t know what to do about the dog.” I threw him in my jacket in case he squirmed – somehow my groggy mind was relatively intelligent, I just realized yesterday that I had even managed to grab his leash. But my thought was, “this isn’t my first fire – how should I know what to do?!?”

In the end, we all ended up being alright, though we haven’t been able to move back in and everything smells pretty smokey. And Rugby has never, ever, eaten so well.

There are a couple articles out there with more about the fire and my dog with one with a video coverage and finally one about a cat that was also in the fire. Apparently people like hearing about pets!

In what can only be described as a tragedy, he took his own life just a few days ago, leaving an agonizing note about abuse and loneliness. He asked people to reproduce the note in its entirety so that people might understand why he did what he did.

It’s a small step I can take to honor those wishes:

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I
assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right
decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by
definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not
writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up
loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve
never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely
draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has
affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I
can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified
and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In
kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified
whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained
social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me
from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical
impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours
playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold,
plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing
I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or
listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling
dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never
connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the
darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required
intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming
appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of
computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would
provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up
something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less
of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime
is covering me. I feel like I’m trapped in a contimated body that no
amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I
feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It
manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or
sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or
constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every
hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It
makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what
feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and
furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the
control it has over my life.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this
hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought
and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk,
unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around,
viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable
to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to
take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I
wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better
able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would
always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to
escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were
the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision
and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen
the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my
situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had
no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but
it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched
alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol
will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my
life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness
will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he
would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source
of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change. I
thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or
lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created
programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California
or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would
feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I
did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was
in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change
anything.

I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my
first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness
affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be
separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as
a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began
to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it
is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships
and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about
him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship
in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic
interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for
a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return
and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome
threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the
more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long
as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something
good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would
envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround
her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I
thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him.
Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became
interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I
thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at
all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over
why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected
sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I
convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college
after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity,
not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept
finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn’t the
answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but
I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I
will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will
never leave.

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met.
Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how
much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be
with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up.
Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had
left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her.
It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me
and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the
darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had
and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I
realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or
only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside
me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of
all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content
or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic
part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as
soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely
that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken
up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do)
even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short
time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with
anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough.
Nothing is enough. There’s no way I can fix this or even push the
darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy
feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time
limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the
darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of
problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should
have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing
what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever
been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as
well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively
quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another
relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal
connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people,
because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was
very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was
because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving
and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the
circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in
those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally
planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of
this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing
this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a
possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only
dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one
more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that
were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the
darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my
inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is
that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone
about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while
to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they
claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a
few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful
the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be
betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised,
they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels
incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone
and have it be between just the two of you. I don’t blame anyone in
particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this
is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a
friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the
damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to
trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened
to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need
to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not
something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to
what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of
killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this
decision should indicate what I’m capable of.

So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated
with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically
harming others.

I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has
defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me
the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know
any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart
from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel
fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke
up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world,
living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a
relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling
the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what
uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with
someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to
give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly.
I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through
the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel
intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I
did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt
many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget
about me quickly.

There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to
leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about
something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve
seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other
issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was
never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent
a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was.
And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both
because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it
would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of
doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear
stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories
that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor
who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who
thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and
have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling
herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single
doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was
gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live
in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I
realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re
based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a
profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to
continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t
feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a
temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old
problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people
have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I
really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day
for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who
can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who
can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can
experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant
misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a
stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no
longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will
probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do.
My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

—

I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise
everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional,
dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a
better place when they’re dead–one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist
Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially
when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for
themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive
by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love.
They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us,
“saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage
of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by
teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:

“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the
Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics
who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child
molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point),
that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by
those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family
and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy
their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never
believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was
literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run
by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others
were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is
going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist
but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds
of other examples, but it’s tiring.

Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal
ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure
why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like
having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life.
Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should
have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time.
At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly
believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me
very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is
because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since
she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell,
which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going
to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is
much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot
intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her.
Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will
cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live. All I know
is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I
couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be
done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a
bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more
acceptable, but I was never so lucky.

—

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with
all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the
person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a
better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I
never got very far.

I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another
option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you
can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Zeller

—

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want
people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I
might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to
restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In
fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and
drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its
entirety.

Goodbye, Bill. We all hope that you have found peace.

Most discussions about web development with people outside of the web development world eventually makes it to the subject of “getting it right.” I’m quite the stickler about a fair amount of stuff, but the same time, I can easily let things go when I feel they aren’t the most important at the time. One of the things that Millie understood immediately was that she will be able to constantly update, improve and change her site. There is no “done.”

When someone writes a newspaper article, a book or a song, they’re done. Sure, there can be multiple editions, rewrites, or versions. Even after the first time they release, they can put out another version or correction of some kind. That new version, remix or correction is not what people will remember. It’s that first version that sticks with people.

However, with websites, people remember the url. They’ll go back to that url, and if there are updates, then that’s totally fine, even expected in many cases. Websites are always updated, there are always new versions. It makes websites different from many other media, but then again, that’s nothing new – websites have and will always be different from other media.