New Orleans expanded the possible

New Orleans, or N'awlins as some say, deserves its own place in this story.

I arrived at Tulane University in 1998 and chose computer engineering as my major. The athletic department was not happy with the decision, but I stuck to my guns with help from NCAA rules that protected my academic choice. That disagreement is a rich story for another day.

The more immediate problem was that I had chosen to study computers without knowing the parts of one.

Computer 101 fascinated me more than it seemed to fascinate many of my classmates because almost everything was new. Most of them had grown up around computers and owned one. I had never used one before college. I was still learning how to type.

I spent an extraordinary amount of time in the computer labs, partly because I wanted to learn and partly because I was embarrassed by how much I did not know. I did not want anyone watching me search for keys or type with one finger. Asking basic questions felt even more exposing, so I often tried to solve confusion privately by staying longer.

The only lab I could access around the clock belonged to the engineering school. Its machines did not run Windows. They ran Unix and Solaris, so Unix and Solaris became the systems I learned.

Much of the work happened through a terminal, often by using Telnet to reach a shared server where I could write and run code. It was not quite traditional time-sharing, but it was close enough to teach me that computing did not have to begin with a personal machine sitting on a desk. That lesson became unexpectedly useful later, when remote servers and cloud computing became central to how software was built and delivered.

My first email client was Pine on the command line. The browser wars were beginning around me, but I became comfortable in the terminal before a graphical browser could define what the internet meant. Text on a screen was enough to reveal that a computer could connect me to people, information, and systems far beyond the room where I was sitting.

By my third year, I had made a friend who would leave me his desktop computer when he went home for the summer. I did not return to Kenya during those years. I would not go home again until after college. His generosity gave me private time with a machine when campus became quiet, without the embarrassment of wondering who might be watching me learn.

Eventually, the first computer I could call my own came from a dumpster. Buying one was beyond my reach, so I rescued a machine someone else had discarded. It was not an elegant beginning, but it was mine. A machine someone else had finished with became a place for me to begin. I installed Linux on it.

Financial constraint had quietly shaped my technical education. Because I could not afford the familiar route, I became comfortable with Unix, Solaris, shared systems, the command line, and later Linux. What first looked like a disadvantage gave me a foundation that would matter when I began thinking deeply about email, servers, and software that could run on infrastructure available to ordinary people.

Programming rewarded a kind of curiosity I already recognized. Ask a clear question. Test what you think you know. Pay attention when the result surprises you. Work within constraints. Improve the solution. Try again.

By my third year, professional possibilities were also beginning to appear. At a conference for Black engineering students, a major defense contractor offered me an internship for the following summer. Later, the hiring manager realized that I was not a United States citizen. The offer could not proceed.

After graduation, a federal space agency invited me to interview at one of its facilities in Alabama. I had traveled far enough to reach the gate. Security stopped me there and denied me entry because I was not a citizen.

Those moments were painful, but rejection was already familiar to me. I learned that a closed door could be both sad and a redirect. Ability had carried me far enough to receive the invitation, yet citizenship and security-clearance requirements could still decide where I was permitted to go.

Years later, I learned that the same agency was using osTicket internally. I had not been allowed through its gate, but software I helped build eventually found its way inside. I do not think of that as revenge. It is a reminder that the route your work takes may reach places you could not enter yourself.

I was fortunate to find an employer willing to sponsor an H-1B visa while the dot-com collapse was spreading through the technology industry. The pay was terrible, but I was grateful for the chance to remain, work, and keep learning. It became the last traditional job I held before Hurricane Katrina changed the direction of my life in 2005.

The computer had already changed my sense of geography. Code written in one room could be used somewhere else. The internet made collaboration possible between people who had never shared an address. Knowledge could travel without asking permission from distance.

For someone from Kolong Village, that idea carried special force.

I did not yet know that I would build an open-source product connecting me with users and contributors around the world, or that I would eventually build teams on two continents. I was simply learning, one difficult concept at a time, that the boundaries around who could make technology were less fixed than they appeared.

New Orleans enlarged my idea of the possible. Tulane gave me the technical foundation to begin building inside it. I came to love the city, and I might not have left if Hurricane Katrina had not forced the question.