Everything is Cringe
Believe it or not - I used to be full of optimism. I grew up in Plymouth, UK (the original one) - and it’s a very slow town. There isn’t a huge amount going on down there - the counties of Devon and Cornwall are, in England, often the places people go to retire. The average salary is £39.8k ($51.5k USD) - which was much less in around 2010 when I was sitting in my mom’s garden debating what I wanted to do with my life at age 20. I had a pretty misspent youth, but I loved computers - and I loved videogames. I’d even worked at one of the only web design agencies in the southwest of England - as an apprentice - for a huge £2/hour (£80/week).
I wanted to make videogames - that was my end goal at the time. I liked playing them, I liked computers and had dabbled a little bit with programming and web design. Naturally, the most logical thing was to get a Computer Science degree - so I did. In my final year, I built a video game analytics platform for Epic Games’ latest videogame Paragon (this was before Fortnite). I’d reverse-engineered the game client, scraped all of the matches, and put them all on a website where you could see how you did and where you might need to improve. I started the /r/Paragon subreddit and ran the largest Discord server. Epic even flew me to North Caroliona (Epic HQ) and Berlin for Paragon events. 35-year-old me would have called this ‘cringe’.
In 2016 - my website caught the eye of Wikia (later rebranded as Fandom), as they were looking to expand outside of their core wiki platform - and a small while later I was acqui-hired. My career trajectory had taken off just after graduation, and a couple years later I had the opportunity to work in the US on an L1-B visa for a six-figure salary. Very cool!
