The Path Not Taken
If I’m being honest, I wanted to major in History.
Not Computer Science. Not IT. Not anything involving servers, protocols, or subnet masks.
I was fascinated by stories — how societies rose and fell, how ideas outlived their authors, how the smallest decisions rippled across centuries. History, to me, was the ultimate network: human connections spanning generations, fragile yet resilient.
But practicality has its own logic. The world needed people who could build systems, not just analyze how old ones broke. So I chose computing — and found a different kind of narrative there, one told in scripts and packets instead of ink and parchment.
When Logic Meets Legacy
Even in computing, I never really left history behind. Both worlds, after all, study systems. Computing builds them; history studies what happens when they collapse.
In both, there’s architecture, conflict, power, and failure. Networks go down for the same reasons empires fall — poor design, weak security, or misplaced trust. And both remind me that progress isn’t always improvement; sometimes, it’s just a more sophisticated way to repeat the same mistakes.
Why I Still Wander Beyond Computing
People assume I live in the glow of monitors and command lines, but my curiosity has always been wider than that. I still read about revolutions, social movements, and the slow burn of economic inequality.
It’s not a hobby — it’s a need for context. Because technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every innovation has a backstory, every algorithm a bias, every system a human consequence.
Understanding history and the humanities keeps my technical world grounded. It reminds me that no matter how advanced we get, the same flaws persist — ego, greed, shortsightedness — just running on faster hardware.
The Myth of the All-Tech Person
We’ve romanticized the “pure tech” identity — the idea that to be great in IT, you must live and breathe machines. But curiosity doesn’t obey specialization.
I can configure routers and still wonder why empires chose war over diplomacy. I can secure networks and still write about culture, poverty, and the human condition. These aren’t contradictions; they’re continuities.
Exploring other fields doesn’t dilute technical mastery — it enriches it. Creativity thrives in detours. Perspective grows in diversity. The best engineers I know are also artists, readers, travelers, and historians at heart.
The Real Lesson
Maybe if I had majored in History, I’d be teaching about empires instead of networks. But here’s the truth: both are systems, both need resilience, and both fail when leadership and learning stop.
Computing gave me a career.
History gave me understanding.
Together, they taught me the same lesson — that technology, like history, is just another way we try to make sense of who we are.