Working on databases from prison

Summary

I'm very excited to announce that I have recently joined Turso as a software engineer. For many in the field, including myself, getting to work on databases and solve unique challenges with such a talented team would be a dream job, but it is that much more special to me because of my unusual and unlikely circumstances. As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison. If you don’t know me, let me tell you more about how I got here. #How I got here Nearly two years have passed since I published How I got here to my blog. That post was my first real contact with the outside world in years, as I'd been off all social media and the internet since 2017. The response and support I would receive from the tech community caught me completely off guard. A brief summary is that I'm currently serving prison time for poor decisions and lifestyle choices I made in my twenties, all related to drugs. Three years ago, I enrolled in a prison college program that came with the unique opportunity to access a computer with limited internet access. This immediately reignited a teenage love for programming and a lightbulb immediately lit up: that this would be my way out of the mess I had gotten myself into over the past 15 years. I quickly outgrew the curriculum, preferring instead to spend ~15+ hours a day on projects and open source contributions. Through fortunate timing and lots of hard work, I was selected to be one of the first participants in the Maine Dept of Correction’s remote work program, where residents who meet certain requirements are allowed to seek out remote employment opportunities. I landed a software engineering job at a startup called Unlocked Labs building education solutions for incarcerated learners, while contributing to open source on the side. After just a year, I was leading their development team. #Finding Turso: hacking on project Limbo Last December I was between side-projects and brows...