For the first 35 years of my life, I have always been “that weird kid”, and later “that weird guy”. When I was young, I just couldn’t fit in with most friend groups. When I got to college, my skill in programming and willingness to tutor earned me the respect of my peers, for possibly the first time ever. Then I graduated and worked on a tiny development team for 5 years, with no friends outside of work. For the last couple years at this company and my one year working remotely, I was living alone; my younger brother who I had been rooming with having moved to Seattle.

This is not to say I felt lonely. I had long ago accepted that I would likely never have close friends. I read, I binged Netflix & YouTube, and I played computer games. I did good work, went home to my cat, relaxed in the evenings, and went to bed to do it again tomorrow.

Things improved in 2015 when I moved to Tennessee and worked on the newly formed & actively growing SmartDollar team at Ramsey Solutions. Because everyone on the team was “new”, and we grew slowly as we staffed up with full-time team members replacing contractors we were able to gel as a team.

Blunt

When I first started my job at Ramsey Solutions, I brought in a focus on code quality and convinced my leader of the importance of good and thorough code review. However, after only a few days my leader had to pull me aside to address a problem. In my zeal for clean code, I had apparently caused one of the contractors working with us to cry after my comments on his pull request. I had overwhelmed their relatively small code diff with a relatively high volume of comments and pointed suggestions, causing them to feel that I thought their contribution was worthless.

I felt terrible, of course. That had not at all been my goal. I had merely wanted to suggest improvements.

This was the first time I had been on the “giving” side of a code review, rather than the “receiving” side. At my previous job, where I was relatively new to both the ruby language and the rails framework, I had made many mistakes, and had to be corrected often, especially early on. The code reviews had been as much or more about maintaining proper style as they were suggestions about changes to my algorithm or general approach. Only naturally, I tried to emulate this experience on my new team.

I spent the next year or so learning how to reign in my desire to fix every problem I could see. I learned how to prioritize important fixes related to algorithm and overall clarity, and de-emphasize or even (occasionally, and with great regret) omit suggestions on simple style. I also had to navigate discussions on what we actually wanted our style to be, and agree to “disagree and commit” if the team voted in favor of a style I disliked.

As a team, we came up with a clear labeling system for all comments to eliminate confusion.

  • blocking means that we will not approve the PR without this issue being addressed.
  • rocking means that this change would improve the code, but isn’t critical and will not affect our final approval of the PR.
  • talking is for questions or general comments about the code, and while questions should be answered before a PR is merged, there often is no need to change the code itself.

Near the end of that first year, we got an automated style linter, which took much of the burden off my shoulders for that part of the review. I continued to practice my approach to feedback and conflict both in code reviews and in person. Eventually I got involved with a wider group of developers via the ruby “chapter” at my company. Pairing with junior developers on designing and refactoring their code helped both of us. The junior developers got a chance to see how well designed code can clean up their app, and I got a chance to get better at communicating in ways that didn’t shut down or discourage my team members.

Bullied

After that first year, once my SmartDollar team had finished filling out, we went through team building exercises from books like “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, which encourages sharing painful stories from one’s past as a way to build rapport.

I was not the only one to share stories of being bullied. Looking back, this had an out-sized influence on me for as infrequent and mild as the bullying was. But at the time, it seemed bad enough.

When I moved to Spokane in 1997 at the beginning of 5th grade, the after-school program we tried first had some older kids who decided I’d make a good target. I don’t remember the escalation, but I do remember the climax: four 6th graders holding my arms and legs, swinging me back and forth and throwing me into the wall, over and over. As they did this, the sang a mean spirited song to the tune of Joy to the World. It took me over a decade before I could hear this Christmas classic without experiencing instant anxiety.

That was the end of that, we found a different after-school program, and all was fine until I got to 7th grade. The lesson had been learned though: older, bigger boys were to be feared. In 7th grade I attracted the attention of one of the few bullies in the tiny alternative school I attended. He didn’t do much, just insulted my second-hand clothes and shoved me as he passed. Eventually after being bounced off a locker one too many times, I decided to report him. Apparently I was not the only one raising a flag, and within a week he was gone.

Things were good again until 9th grade. My high school incoming freshman class was 1200 kids, of whom 400 would eventually drop out, and 700 (90% of graduates) would go on to college (yay inner-city schools with proper funding). The school was big enough to have whole vibrant subcultures, including “The Russians”.

Everyone knew not to mess with The Russians, because it wouldn’t just be a one-on-one fight. The Russians, in turn, used this general fear to get away with a fair bit of light bullying. In my case, this meant getting basketballs thrown at me in P.E. class. After several days of this, I had enough, and tossed one back. Despite a general lack of sports skills and a more profound lack of depth perception, I somehow managed to nail the ringleader in the head from across the gym. I instantly broke out into a cold sweat, realizing that I was in a lot of danger. I carried around my mini Leatherman pocket knife open in my pocket as I walked through the halls the rest of the day, and was sure I would be jumped waiting in line for my bus as others had been. By a clear miracle, the guy decided I wasn’t worth beating to a a pulp that day, and I was careful to never catch his attention again.

That was the end of it; the rest of high school passed unceremoniously. I pulled my middling grades up my last year by actually doing my homework regularly and ended off the school year with a 4.0 average.

Turning Point

I joined Twitter in 2009, just after I had left college, to keep in touch with old classmates. Most did not post frequently, so I ended up following my coworkers too. From their retweets and linked blog articles, I found more and more developers to follow over time. Very quickly, I jumped out of the mobile phone development space into the web development space. I ended up following many ruby developers, and thus began my fascination with the language and the associated rails framework.

Years later (2013-ish) I became a ruby developer myself and found people to follow as much from conference talks and newsletters as organic retweets. Among a dozen others, I ended up following Brandon Weaver (@keystonelemur) and Josh Susser (@joshsusser). I saw Brandon in person at the local ruby conferences, and even got to be a fellow speaker at Southeast Ruby in 2018.

Both Brandon and Josh shared their experiences of being Autistic, and retweeted many other pro-Autistic Twitter accounts. This primed my pump, over two years ago.

Then, in 2021, my son was born. There were times, very early on, when it occurred to me to wonder if he was Autistic. I even went as far as googling early signs. But he never matched the stereotypical symptoms well enough for me to be “concerned” (yes, I know…).

Penny in the air.

Now, I have always prided myself on how I try hard to learn about other lived experiences, and how I try to understand people who are different than me. So naturally, when Josh tweeted a recommendation for the book Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, I thought: aha! a chance to learn more about these lovely people who are so very different from me.

I only wish I was kidding about that motivation…

Needless to say, I didn’t make it halfway through the book before it started to feel less like an examination of a foreign group, and more like reading a description of my own life. By the end (a weeks long process since I was listening to an audiobook during my lunch breaks), I was convinced that I too was a masked Autistic person.

Penny dropped.

Hesitance

Now, this was not my first rodeo. I have watched countless other causes get muddied by people jumping on a bandwagon and claiming labels they had no right to. Autism is a clinically diagnosable condition, surely I couldn’t know with such certainty after reading one book.

Luckily, I didn’t have to suffer long. Shortly after finishing the book, I found the lovely accounts “You Might be Autistic” (@mightbeautistic) and “Save the Neurotypicals” (@SNeurotypicals), both of whom have a consistent message affirming self-identification. After only another month of simmering, I was comfortable claiming the #ActuallyAutistic title, at least in my own head. It only took another couple more months(!) of research and introspection before I felt comfortable to start coming out to my friends. That brings us back to the present day.

Hatching

During these last couple months, I bought, re-read, and heavily underlined a print copy of Unmasking Autism. I have also started trying to intentionally lower my mask, especially in the area of stimming. It is hard to describe just how strange it is to be in your mid-thirties and suddenly have your hands start flapping. As natural as it felt in the moment, I had a very hard time not staring myself, and an even harder time not immediately bringing the mask back up and stilling myself.

I have had subtler, less obvious (even to me) stims all my life, of course. All the men on my dad’s side of the family tap their feet, so this was seen as socially appropriate. I quietly snap my fingers, or “count” on them, touching my thumb to each of my fingers in turn, back and forth. I “type” sometimes, even away from the computer. When I am outside the office, especially when I help in children’s church, I feel comfortable rocking in my seat during a story or video.

One of the first friends I told about being Autistic was my teammate and best man Luke. He laughed, and told me I was the third of his friends this year to say that we had self-identified as Autistic. He also said that in each of the cases, it seemed obvious in hindsight. There is a reason Luke is my friend.

Retropiphany

There have been dozens or hundreds of these over the last four months.

Most startling has been what feels like a long list of obvious (in retrospect) Autistic people I have known throughout my life.

The first couple were actually diagnosed: I have an adopted cousin who is Deaf, Autistic, and has other learning disabilities. My cousins were all much older than me, though, so I never really thought of it much.

Then there was 5th grade. The year was 1997, and I had just moved from Portland, OR to Spokane, WA. I was a fish out of water, and so when I was invited to a “special friends” club at my school, I accepted. It turned out to be a “peer-to-peer” pairing of special needs kids with “normal” kids, to help socialize them. I, predictably, got paired with Bobby, an Autistic boy. Bobby muttered almost constantly and doodled in his notebooks. It was hard to engage him in conversation, and he never once looked me in the eye.

I couldn’t explain it at the time, but as frustrating as it was not to get much of a conversation out of Bobby as the facilitators obviously wanted, I enjoyed the time we spent together. Over the weekly sessions, I discovered that he was quoting lines from cartoons and what I much later would recognize as anime. He had a good knack for doing the different voices, even if it sounded odd coming from a 10 year old. His “doodling” was also very technically advanced, with clean lines and complex arrangement.

I felt… comfortable around Bobby, despite his quirks. This may have been the last time I felt comfortable just “being” with someone outside my immediate family until the last few years. Bobby didn’t require anything from me, and I felt no need to change my own behavior to make him comfortable.

I did not know anyone noticeably Autistic through middle- or high-school. It’s possible the bullying just kept me from associating with anyone different enough during this time, or maybe it was just too large of a population to get to know people well.

I went to the local Eastern Washington University, only 15 miles outside Spokane. My first year I lived at home and started my computer science major. My second year, I moved in with a friend from the degree, and two of his friends. One of the friends was another computer science major, a guy I had noted as being even further along in his early studies than I was.

Looking back, this roommate was very stereotypically Autistic, even if I couldn’t identify it at the time. I might have called him robotic, naive, cold, and logical. He was a great friend, and I was sad to see him move out after only a year.

Much later, in Nashville, I had a coworker (on another team, but I frequently collaborated with him) who reminded me of my roommate, but more so. Looking back, he was just very bad at masking. He earnestly tried to come off as friendly, but just came off as creepy (to my neurotypically trained senses). I wish I had already been identified at the time myself and could have noticed how hard he was trying to fit in, instead of just how badly he was failing at it. He left after only a couple years, and I regret any part I had in making him feel uncomfortable. Once I self-identified, I reached out to him on LinkedIn and apologized, but he doesn’t appear to be ready to walk this path yet himself, so there was only so much I could say.

There definitely are and have been others that in retrospect likely are Autistic, but I don’t know anyone in person. I’d like to find some sort of a local meetup perhaps.

Autistic Attributes

When I read the standard book on the Enneagram, “Road Back To You”, it was pretty clear what “type” I was from the list of descriptors at the beginning of the chapter for “Ones”.

It was much less clear going through books and tweets and videos about Autistic experiences. There is just so much diversity, it can be hard to see the thru lines.

I like Autistamatic’s youtube channel, and especially this video on the Autistic triad.

Like half of Autistic people, I have identified as having Alexithymia, which blunts my initial emotional processing, and often delays processing. Like many people with this condition, I have a hard time saying more than that I feel “bad” or “good” in an on-the-spot response. If I have a few minutes to process the situation, I can probably respond with the emotion I think a neurotypical person in my situation would be feeling (yay masking!).

I do not have any profound hypersensitivity, though there are definitely sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that seem to bother me more than a “normal” person. I think I do have hyposensitivity in several areas, though these are harder to identify.

I definitely strongly identify with the “veracity” section of that video. I feel the need to be precisely correct in how I communicate, and it bothers me when I have to navigate the inaccuracies of social interactions and broadly held beliefs.

I definitely identify with the concept of Autistic inertia & executive dysfunction. This was the final nail in the coffin when I was reading Unmasking Autism. I realized that there was a name for that feeling when I was sitting on my couch, staring at my kitchen, desperately wanting to get up and clean the mountains of dishes, but physically unable to do so. This gave me so much retroactive grace for feeling like a lazy slob.

Special Interests

One of my earliest memories is going to a book store for the first time and being told I could buy any book I wanted. After taking far too long looking at all the options (oh how my parents hated shopping with me growing up) I landed on the largest book I could find: the “Dorling Kindersley Science Encyclopedia”. At 1.5 inches thick and a full 8.5x11 form factor pages, this was a beast for such a small child. But I took the thing home and spent weeks carefully going through it.

When I got to the section on electromagnetism and motors and generators, I decided to test if it was true that a generator was just a motor you turned yourself. I got out some wires, a lego motor & wheel, and the TV remote, and in 30 seconds had powered up the remote, both turning on the TV and changing channels by rolling the wheel back and forth on the floor.

Since then, I have never left my love for all things science related.

In grade school and middle school (when homework was relatively light), I was known to max out my library card up to a couple times a week, reading everything I could get on my hands on in whatever corner of science I was interested in at the time.

As an adult, I pay for Youtube premium so I can consume hundreds of hours of science, engineering, and DIY videos a month without ads. At least, I used to consume this much content, before I got married. But I still get in at least a few dozen hours in a month, and my wife is very patient with me.

I have also always enjoyed movies, TV shows, and fiction books, especially science fiction & fantasy. I often return to my “comfort” series, like the 10 seasons of “Stargate SG1” (watched at least 3 times), the 300 hours of audio in the “Wheel of Time” series (currently on my 8th cycle), or the ongoing saga of Doctor Who (rewatched all former seasons before the new one came out).

Software Development

When I was young, I always read well above my grade level, and between bursts of interest in some science topic I would read literally any random book I picked up of the library shelf. This was how, at age 8, I learned to program in BASIC, checking out a book (eventually all 3 books on the topic) from my grade school library.

This special interest in software was not always my main study, but as is the fashion, I spiraled back to it often. As such, it was no surprise that when I learned I could study programming in college and skip the introductory class due to years of experience, I immediately declared my major.

When I took my first programming test, I took out the 4 colored pens I had in my pocket at all times (doesn’t everyone?) and wrote properly indented and fully compiling syntax highlighted code in pen for each of the questions. The teacher gave a double take and then laughed out loud when I handed in my paper.

To this day, I am often able to spot syntax errors in other people’s code the way you would proofread a paper, even without my IDE telling me about the problem. I have internalized all the code style rules my team uses and can type out properly formatted code in a markdown document like this (or more often a Microsoft Teams message) with little effort.

As a professional software developer, the bite-sized “trivia”-like nature of code has lead to me having a vast mental index of nearly all the code I have written (or even paired on) over the last 5-7 years. It is as easy for me to recall where (and why) I wrote some method 5 years ago as it is for me to quote a line from a favorite movie I haven’t seen in as long.

About 3 years ago, I realized that I was “weird” in the way I approached writing software too. Where neurotypical developers are able to break down problems into smaller and smaller pieces until they can write code for a part, or “test-drive” out solutions to complex problems, I have only two modes.

I can either:

  1. look at the ticket in our project management software and immediately have the majority of the code in my head for the solution (up to about 2-3k lines), or
  2. fail at the above, stare blankly at the screen for a bit, and then just start trying stuff until I arrived at a solution, and then could go back and clean it up.

It took talking to several developers and seeing their initial looks of stunned disbelief melt into abject horror for me to realize there might be something… different about me, long before anything else popped up.

Now that I am openly Autistic at work, I am careful to heavily qualify any career advice I give, since most of my colleagues simply could not learn programming the way I have. It is one of the most “othered” experiences I have had as an adult, even though it is entirely situational and not caused by any person.

Conclusion

This was very long (yay info-dump?) but I don’t feel right breaking it up. I may write more on these subjects or others in the future, but now at least I have a place I can point to when people want to know more about my Autistic self.

Thanks for sticking with me to the end!


For more reading on the topic of Autism: click here