Please don't get a motorcycle:

A good felon buddy of mine has been out now for 4 years. He slowly built a car repair business, with steady clientele, and got his life back on track – including reasonable sobriety and a steady relationship. He and his girl would cruise around often, enjoying their newfound happiness.

Last week he totaled his Harley and his body (destroyed bike, multiple broken bones). Total reset. He now gets PTSD whenever a Harley revvs by passing... cannot work.

Please don't get a motorcycle.

Thank you for sharing your story! I wish you continued success and I also hope that one day someone will share with you about how YOUR story helped them do something similar, just like the article did for you.

Also, Preston Thorpe (who Gavin mentions as inspiration) has an interesting story as well: https://pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/

Also recommend folks check out Unlocked Labs, who run a prison program for this sort of thing. Jessica is an angel:

https://unlockedlabs.org/

I love such stories. Right now, a lot of folks I know are struggling to find jobs, so I read the part about how he got a job the first day he was out of jail with some astonishment and nostalgia for the simpler days, when showing interest was often enough to land the job! Now, hoop number 1, the AI resume filter, is a strange obstacle that one has to jump through first.

“ No part of the prose was machine-generated. You will not find machine-written prose on this blog. I consider it deeply disrespectful.”

<3

Thank you for sharing. Stories like yours remind us that there is good in the world, and even if it isn’t everywhere, it is still worth cultivating.

I’m a software engineer née scientist, but my spouse is a therapist who specializes in addiction. They (and I!) cherish stories like yours because we had seen up-close the struggle that so many people face.

Thank you!!

Thanks for sharing, Gavin.

Can relate. Been 45 years, for me. Got my act together at 18, but before that...

Your compassionate and honest story will, I hope, bear much fruit. You write well..very readable and engaging.

I feel happiness reading stories like this. You proved to the world that you can become something great even when all the cards are stacked against you. I often feel despair when I think about where our society is heading, but there will always be people like you who are there to push back against all the wrongs in the world and make the best out of it.

I’m curious (as a recovered alcoholic myself) how you got sober.

I'll be honest, a lot of it was my wife. And also hitting my lowest bottom after becoming homeless and penniless.

So a combination of looking at what I had done to myself + everyone around me and going "what the fuck." and my ever-vigilant wife who knew I had the capacity and desire to get better.

For me it really took literally losing everything.

"AI Use Disclaimer: claude code was used to generate the OpenGraph SVG image.

No part of the prose was machine-generated. You will not find machine-written prose on this blog. I consider it deeply disrespectful."

I really like this disclaimer, by disclaiming that a single small thing was done with AI, you make very credible and notable that you did not use LLMs for the important parts.

Have an upvote. Sobriety is an expectation. I will say though that people I’ve known who went through the journey are some of the smarter people I’ve met. Not all of them, but the whole numbing yourself because your brain can’t quite understand all the thoughts it has, that’s a real thing. Probably sounds insane, but it’s real.

  > sobriety doesn’t guarantee that AI companies won’t kill off what’s left of your career

You're being downvoted, but I'd be lying if I said I don't see that as a distinct (and logical) possibility.

The ironic thing is, I work for one of those "AI Companies" ;^)

Claude Code and Codex have done most of my work for the last year, and with the pace of AI improvement, I'm not sure that you'd need (or even want) me in the mix.

From a business perspective, it makes a lot of financial sense, too.

I'm sure it's a limited amount of time before I'm dead weight, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, and I'll figure something out if/when it happens =)

My lived experience doesn’t care what the downvotes say (many here are privileged, after all), and it is only a matter of time imo unless something is done about the industry to change course.

I see karma as form of a currency to afford getting downvoted. I actually don't mind the downvotes especially when it's followed by a comment on why. Helps me see parts I've missed.

Good on him and shout out for Hasura as well, probably the most pleasant dev experience I had in past 10 years. It was so good, the startup I was at dropped it because CTO got scared that there was no work for the backend devs, ha.