Compiling the Past and Linking the Dots

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward."When Steve Jobs said that, he was talking about calligraphy classes and typography. For me, it was buffer overflows, rendering equations, and the Chromium project.If you had looked at my career path a decade ago, you wouldn't have seen a straight line. You would have seen a sharp, arguably foolish, jagged edge. I was established in a high-paying, comfortable career in computer security. I knew how to break things, how to secure them, and how to get paid well for doing it. But I was restless. I wanted to build, specifically in the visual, mathematically elegant world of computer graphics. So, I did what anyone looking for a clean break does: I walked away from the money, committed to grad school, and threw myself into the deep end of computer graphics.Looking forward, it felt like I was resetting my life. I was convinced I was going to leave security behind forever and emerge as a pure graphics…