Trapped in My Apartment

Childhood Memories

I grew up in Newfoundland in a town called Manuels, which is part of Conception Bay South. We lived in a house that was a short drive from the Manuels River, which I remember visiting a few times with my family. Once time when I was at the Manuels River, I found a trilobite fossil. I remember looking at the fossil. The trilobite was around the size of the palm of my hand. It was pretty cool.

During the time that I lived in Manuels, I spent most of my time in the neighbourhood around our house. I had friends who lived in our neighbourhood, and I would often walk over to their houses and knock on their doors in order to find out if they were able to hang out. When we hung out, we would usually travel around our neighbourhood on our bicycles. There were many places in our neighbourhood where we could hang out. Our house was on a road that was not far from the ocean, and there were many forests nearby. I remember making multiple attempts to build structures in the woods that my friends and I could hang out inside, which we called forts. They were haphazardly designed structures that mostly relied on gravity to hold them together, as we did not have access to very many nails that we could use.

For many years, the road that we lived on was not paved and had a gravel surface. Instead of sidewalks on each side of the road, there were ditches. The gravel surface, with ditches on either side of the road, meant that when we crashed our bikes, the landing would often be rather painful. However, this would generally not discourage us from continuing to ride our bikes, as it was our only method of travelling around the neighbourhood easily. Eventually, the road was paved, and I remember the day when this was done. There was a huge machine that came down the road and laid down asphalt. Somehow, my parents also arranged for this machine to come and pave our driveway at the same time as the road. After this was done, it became much easier to ride our bicycles.

The First Computer

At some point, my parents bought a computer and set it up in our house. It ran MS-DOS. When we first got the computer, I was so young that I was barely able to use it. I remember typing random things at the DOS prompt just to see what the computer would do. I remember not being able to get the computer to do anything interesting, however it did print the things that I typed.

When I got a bit older, I had learned enough about the computer that I knew that it could be programmed, and I remember trying to use QuickBASIC. If I remember correctly, I think the first program that I wrote was a program that printed this message:

Do you want to quit? [Y/N]

The message was actually a trick, because you actually had to press N to quit the program. If you pressed Y it would repeat the message. This was the most complicated program that I was able to create at the time. I wanted it to operate differently than normal quit messages, and this was the only other possibility. I remember thinking that I wished I knew how to create a more complicated program.

Elementary School

By the time that I was in elementary school, the Internet was starting to become popular. During the time that I lived in Manuels, my family had a modem, and we occasionally used it to download specific things from the Internet to the computer. We had a copy of The Internet Yellow Pages, which we would use to look up what we would download before we connected to the Internet. I am not sure what service we used for Internet access, however it was very limited. After downloading something to the computer, we would immediately disconnect.

Sometime around 1996, my family moved from Manuels to St. John's, which is the capital city of Newfoundland. St. John's was more urban than Manuels had been. Unlike in Manuels, there were no groups of children my age that were hanging out in the streets or anywhere else in public around the house. I remember that after we moved, I tried to make friends by knocking on the doors of my neighbours and asking if they had any kids my age who wanted to hang out. This was something that made sense to me because when I lived in Manuels it was how I found out if my friends were able to hang out. This was not successful, and I suspect that my neighbours felt that I was doing something strange. It took me a long time to make friends in St. John's. Due to my lack of friends, I ended up spending more time on the computer.

Our house in St. John's was located very close to Memorial University, which had a public library next to it that I was able to visit. The library had computers that anyone could use to go online, and in addition they offered some kind of dial up Internet service that people could sign up for. My family signed up for this service, and this was how I was first able to connect to the Internet for extended periods from our computer at home. However, we were not able to use the dial up service very often, and I would often physically travel to the library and use the computers there to go online. One time when I was there I noticed that I was sitting next to someone who was using the computer for something very interesting that involved using the computer in the mode where it was filled with text in a monospace font, rather than browsing websites. I tried to watch them and see what they were doing, however they noticed me and got annoyed.

I found the Internet fascinating and I wanted to participate, and so I started creating my own websites. They were usually fan websites. I think my first website might have been a Star Wars fan website. I remember trying out GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod and Hypermart in order to host my website. I remember that Hypermart was appealing because they allowed people to write their own CGI scripts in Perl, and they had a mechanism for including their ads inline into your website rather than having to have pop-up ads. I enjoyed experimenting with the technology. I remember that I was a fan of the <frameset> tag in particular, even though people online were saying it was a bad idea to use them. I remember creating a website with lots of frames. One of the frames would constantly scroll what appeared to be movie credits for the site, attributing all of the work to myself, while another frame had a music player that would play one of several MIDI files that I had uploaded. I remember that one of the MIDI files played the soundtrack from the Mission: Impossible movie.

Around this time, I also started to become interested in reading novels. At school, the teachers would periodically distribute paper booklets created by Scholastic which advertised various books that were considered appropriate for my age group and made it easy to order them by filling out a form and bringing it to the teacher. I would often order books using this system. In addition, I would sometimes physically go to local book stores and see what books they had. This was how I would obtain Star Wars and Star Trek books. I often used to bring books to school and would read them at my desk rather than paying attention in class. I remember I once got in trouble for doing this.

One book series that I particularly enjoyed reading was the Animorphs book series, which I had been ordering from the Scholastic catalog at school. I decided that the book series was a good topic for a website, so I created a website with a bunch of information about the books. I started referring to myself online as Animorph90 and I called my website Animorph90's Animorphs. This was the most significant website that I made which it appeared that people were actually reading. I remember one time I wrote JavaScript code for grading a trivia quiz, and I later noticed that the code that I had written had been directly copied onto another website for their quiz. It was a sign that they had been reading my website, at least.

Eventually, I somehow got the idea of buying a domain name for my Animorphs page. Somehow, I was able to convince my parents to use their credit card to pay the 70 US dollars required to register the domain. My memory is a little hazy, however I am pretty sure I have a vague memory of writing referral links to buy the books from Amazon. Unfortunately, I cannot remember if I actually made any money from the referral links. If I did, maybe that was how I convinced my parents to spend the money on the domain. I wish I could remember this part a little bit better. It is possible that my parents simply gave me the money.

The animorphs.com domain itself was registered by the company that sold the books, and so I registered ani-morphs.com. It did not bother me that the name of the domain was difficult to describe verbally due to the fact that it contained a dash character. I was only 11 or 12 years old at the time, and I felt that it was very cool to have my own domain name.

Junior High

One thing that I liked about running my Animorphs website was that it made it easy for me to make friends with people over the Internet. Ever since I had moved from Manuels to St. John's, I had found it difficult to make friends locally, however the Internet felt like a very social place and it seemed very easy to make friends there. There were other people online who were interested in Animorphs and were interested in my website. Some of them offered to help me maintain the website, and I accepted their help. I suspect I eventually gave someone the password for the website, as over time, other people starting being able to make changes to the site without needing me to do it.

At one point during this period, while I was in junior high, I remember I was contacted by a company that was making an Animorphs Card Game, and they wanted me to review the game and describe it on my website. I agreed to do this and they mailed the game to me. I remember looking at the game and wanting to play it, however it was a game that you were supposed to play with other people, and I did not actually have anyone to play the game with besides my brother, who was not really interested in Animorphs. I kept procrastinating actually writing the review, and I am pretty sure that in the end I did not write it. I felt a little bit bad about this at the time, because I did appreciate that I had been sent the game for free.

However, even though I initially found it difficult to make friends after moving to St. John's, by the time that I was in junior high I did start to slowly be able to make friends with my classmates in school. I also started to become less interested in reading Animorphs. After a while, I stopped paying attention to the site. When the time came to renew the domain name I added a message to the top of the homepage saying that the site would be shut down, and did not renew the domain.

Unfortunately, I no longer have any copies of any of the websites that I made during this period, aside from a small number of files that I downloaded from the Internet Archive. I am not sure what happened to the copies of my websites which I should have had on my personal computer at the time. It is an unfortunate loss, because in retrospect the experience with my Animorphs website was an important part of my early life. When I read the <meta> tags in the source code for one of the pages that I do have, I can see that the site apparently had a message board and a chatroom. There is also a reference to fan fiction. I asked a family member about this, and they told me that my site would allow others to upload their own fan fiction. I wonder if people were using these features of the website.

High School

By the time that I was in high school, I knew a lot more about computers. I had become interested in Linux and open source. In 2001, while I was in Grade 10, I started trying to write my own operating system. It was very primitive. The only parts that I actually completed were a boot loader written in assembly language as well as some functions in C that could write messages to the VGA buffer so that they would be displayed onscreen. The code that I wrote worked and it was able to boot and print messages. I remember that at the time, Intel would send people physical x86 architecture manuals for free, and I had a copy of the manuals which I read a significant portion of. I liked reading through the manuals and learning what each x86 instruction did.

As part of my effort to build an operating system, I created a small website describing my plan. I also registered the domain name kr4z.com with the intention of using it to host websites about my operating system and other projects. The domain kr4z.com was much shorter than ani-morphs.com and more generic, so I would be able to use it for any purpose. I started using kr4z as my Internet screen name. The name was based on the word zark from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I reversed the order of the letters and replaced the letter "a" with the number 4, as I felt this made the screen name look like it was written in Leet speak. I created subdomains for my friends in Newfoundland so that they could host their websites at kr4z.com, and I also started running an IRC server at irc.kr4z.com. Unfortunately, my kr4z.com website did not have anything that would cause people to visit the site on their own, like the Animorphs website did. This made the experience not quite as satisfying.

The high school that I went to gave people the option of trying to obtain an IB diploma in addition to a regular high school diploma, and this was something that I attempted while I was there. It was an interesting experience. The courses were considered advanced compared to the regular courses and required extra work. I found the extra work stressful, and so when I was partway through the IB program I decided not to continue and I switched back to the regular courses. Even though I did not obtain the IB diploma, by the time I switched back to the regular courses I had already completed some of the IB courses. For one of the courses, I was supposed to write a paper which had to be a certain length and I was allowed to choose the topic. I chose to write a paper comparing monolithic kernels to microkernels, and I started writing the paper. Unfortunately, after I switched back to the regular high school courses I stopped writing the paper, and so I did not finish it.

High school was the time when I first started having serious crushes on girls that I knew from my classes. There were a few girls that I liked. Even though I liked them, I was never quite sure what I could do or say that would convince them to like me back, and so most of the time I just thought about it without doing anything. There was one girl that I liked the most, however, and I remember that I told my friends that I liked her, thinking that she might find out indirectly from my friends. Even though I wanted her to know that I liked her, I was not sure what I would actually do if I was talking to her about it myself. When it came time to graduate from high school, I asked her if she wanted to be my date for the graduation ceremony, and she said yes. I was very happy about this. After the graduation ceremony, I tried to continue the relationship and I invited her on a date. For our date, we went to the movie theatres and saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Unfortunately, after this I was not sure what I should do in order to continue the relationship, and so our official relationship ended not long after that. We ended up hanging out a few more times after this, because she ended up joining my friend group, however we only hung out as friends as part of a group.

My high school experience was also notable due to the fact that in 2001, not long after I started high school, the September 11 attacks occurred. This impacted me directly, because after the attacks occurred, the United States government shut down the airspace over the entire country and forced all flights to land as soon as possible. Many of the flights which had previously been on the way to the US over the Atlantic Ocean were forced to land at the airport in St. John's. In order to provide temporary shelter for the large number of people who had been on the planes, my high school stopped classes so that the space could be used to temporarily house them. I remember watching the news at the time. It was clear that we were observing a very significant and unusual event.

University

After graduating from high school in 2004, I enrolled at Memorial University, which was the university that was located near the house that my family lived in. Once I began the courses, schoolwork started to take up more of my time than it had in high school. I stopped trying to build my own operating system, though I was still very interested in computers and programming. As a student, I got reasonably good grades, however I started getting into the habit of missing a lot of class, due to the fact that unlike in high school, there were no negative repercussions for missing class aside from having to learn the material that had been taught in class on my own. This was fine with me, as I often found that I learned the material better anyway from reading the textbook on my own rather than from listening to the professor teach the topic in class, at least for most courses. I got my highest grades in the programming courses, which I was able to achieve even though programming classes were the ones I skipped the most often. Usually, it would turn out that I already understood everything that was going to be taught in the programming courses before starting the course. Even though I often missed the classes, I would still hang out at school with the other students taking the courses, and I remember that for programming courses I sometimes would help other students finish the assignments even though I had missed the classes. When I graduated from university, we had a graduation ceremony which involved giving out awards to various students in the class, which were mostly joke awards intended to be amusing. I received the "class ghost" award, as a consequence of missing so many classes.

During this time, my friends and I started getting into the habit of visiting a specific bar and restaurant that were next door to each other, and were near the university, every Thursday evening after school or work. Usually we would start at the restaurant and have food and drinks, and then go to the bar afterwords. The bar did not serve food, however they had relatively cheap drinks and a pool table. The restaurant was a Mexican restaurant, which had an upstairs area that was more bar-like, with a place to order drinks and a table next to it that usually had self-serve nachos as well as various toppings for the nachos, which you were allowed to have as long as you had ordered a drink. I have now been to this restaurant and the bar next door hundreds of times, and have a lot of memories there. Behind the restaurant and bar, there was another large building which had a spot where a group of people could stand to shield themselves from the wind, and there happened to be a sign there that said "wrong way", intended for cars. We would often go to this spot to smoke marijuana, and when we were in the restaurant or bar, if someone wanted to suggest smoking a joint, they would just ask if people wanted to go to the "wrong way". When I was old enough to move out of my parents house, I ended up purposefully finding an apartment that was near this restaurant and bar, so that I could travel there easily, and over time it started to become traditional for everyone to go to my apartment after going to the bar every Thursday, in order to play video games and drink more beer.

When I was hanging out with my friends during this time, I would occasionally talk about politics, though it did not come up very often. I generally considered myself to have left-leaning views on most things. I was in the habit of watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report every day. I used to download the episodes using BitTorrent so that I would not miss any episodes. By this time, I had also read the Wikipedia article on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, as well as other related Wikipedia articles, and felt sympathetic towards the Palestinians. I have one specific memory of having a conversation with someone in the Mexican restaurant on Thursday, in which someone else made a comment that there were people who were antisemitic, who believed that Jewish people ran the world. I remember wanting to give a nuanced opinion, and I responded with a comment on how there were actually a lot of well-known Jewish people, and I gave the example of Jon Stewart, just because his name was the first name that came to mind because he was the host of The Daily Show, which I watched regularly. The person I was chatting with gave me a weird look, and then changed the topic, like they did not want to discuss it. I remember feeling a little frustrated that I had not been able to express my opinion properly, and that it appeared that the other person might have thought that I had antisemitic views, which was not correct.

While I was in university, I met a woman who would eventually become my long term girlfriend. We met in 2007 in a bar after I had attended a Wintersleep concert with some friends. We had a mutual friend who knew both of us, who had invited her to meet us at the bar. I found her very attractive. I asked her out and we quickly became a couple.

Post-University

After I graduated from university in 2010, I started thinking about making long term plans for my life. The first thing that I did was to start working full time at Avalon Microelectronics, which was the last company where I had worked as a student before graduating. The company decided to offer me a job as a full time employee after I graduated. After working there full time for less than a year, the company ended up being acquired by Altera. This worked out very well for me, because Altera also had an office in Toronto, and it was possible to do an internal transfer, which seemed like it would be an easier process than applying to the company externally. Moving to Toronto was something that I had previously been considering for a long time, and so I was excited about the possibility. However, I decided that I did not want to do it right away. My girlfriend at the time had decided to start doing her masters degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and it made sense to me to wait until she was finished so that we could both move to Toronto together.

While my girlfriend was finishing her degree, I lived in my apartment by myself. I had a lot of free time during this period, because I no longer had any schoolwork. One of the things that I did with my free time was to focus on trying to lose weight. The fact that I had a regular schedule which was the same every day, and had total control over all of my meals, made this much easier to achieve than it otherwise would have been while I was in university. I was able to reduce my weight from over 230 pounds to an average of around 170 pounds. The difference in my appearance was dramatic, and I went from wearing extra large t-shirts to wearing a size medium. At one point I visited my girlfriend in Edmonton after losing a lot of weight, and I was very proud to show her what I had achieved.

In addition to losing weight, during this time I also had a lot of free time to read books. It was around this time that I first became interested in idea of the technological singularity. I remember that I was very influenced by the opinions of Ray Kurzweil, which he had expressed in his book The Singularity Is Near. There had also been some spoken dialog from Kurzweil included in the album Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace, which was a band that I often listened to at the time. I ended up reading The Singularity Is Near in electronic form, which I purchased from the Amazon Kindle store along with a few other books related to the technological singularity, in particular Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee which I half-finished. I also read the first half of On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee, which described a theory about how conciousness might be implemented in the brain. I thought that the idea of the singularity was fascinating. It seemed to me that anyone who was able to survive long enough to still be around when the singularity occurred would probably become immortal and live until the end of civilization. I hoped that I would be able to be one of the people who lived long enough to experience it.

In addition to the books related to the singularity, around this time I also read A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran by Trita Parsi, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, and the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. These were also interesting books. I remember that the Steve Jobs biography contained a quote by Steve Jobs that referred to the computer as a bicycle for our minds, which was a concept that stuck with me. I like the quote.

Another thing that happened to me during this time was that my apartment was broken into while I was at work one day and several of my possessions were stolen. It happened on a Friday, the day after I had friends over the evening before in order to drink beer and play video games, and so the apartment was a mess. I called the police to report the crime, however I decided to clean up the worst of the mess before the police came, because otherwise it would have been too embarrassing.

Having my apartment broken into was a significant event for me. My laptop was stolen, along with some computer parts and video games. I found it stressful to leave the apartment by itself for a while after it occurred. In order to alleviate my worries, I set up some cameras inside the apartment which I configured to start taking photos whenever there was movement and to immediately upload the photos to Amazon S3, so that even if the cameras themselves were stolen I would still have the photos of whoever did it. I pointed one of the cameras so that it had a view of my living room, which was next to the door that led outside, and pointed another one out of the window so that it would capture the image of anyone approaching the apartment. I also put a sign in the window telling anyone who could read it that by the time they read the sign, they had already been photographed, to discourage anyone from trying to break in. In addition to this, I configured the cameras so that I could watch a live stream of the video feed from my desk at work. Once I had done all of these things, I started to feel comfortable again with leaving my apartment by itself. Unfortunately, the police did not contact me again after I reported the crime, so I presume they were unable to find whoever did it. I ended up filing an insurance claim in order to pay for a replacement laptop.

Another thing that happened during this period which was somewhat interesting was that in 2010, I decided to purchase another domain name, atom.io. I was not sure what I was going to use it for exactly, however I felt like I wanted to own a short domain that was clearly a word, in addition to the kr4z.com domain that I had owned for a long time. Just under two years later, at the end of 2011, I received an email from someone who wanted to buy it from me on behalf of their client for $2,000 USD. I was very tempted by the offer, because I had purchased it for much less than that, which meant that I was going to make a profit. I thought about it for a while, and told them that I would sell it for $5,000, and they agreed to my price. After I sold the domain, I looked at the DNS records to find out who bought it, and found out that the domain was purchased by GitHub, who ended up using it as the domain for their JavaScript-based Atom text editor starting in 2014. After I sold the domain in 2011, I still liked the name, and I ended up using atom as the name for a project that I hosted on GitHub, which was going to be my own web-based operating system that could run apps written in JavaScript. The fact that GitHub ended up using it for a JavaScript-based application was an interesting coincidence.

This time period was also around the time that the Liberal Party of Canada was going through a difficult period as a result of an extremely poor performance in the 2011 federal election, in which they had come in third place behind the Conservative Party and the NDP. I am pretty sure that I voted for the NDP in the 2011 election as a form of strategic voting due to the fact that polling was indicating that the NDP candidate was more likely than the Liberal candidate to win against the Conservative candidate in my voting district. When the results were announced, I was unhappy with the overall result due to the fact that the Conservative Party had won a majority government despite only receiving 39.62% of the popular vote. The Liberal party result was the worst that the party had achieved in the history of the party, and at the time a lot of people were saying that the first-past-the-post voting system was a key reason why it had occurred. In order to try to regain popularity, they started promising democratic reforms, and in order to demonstrate their commitment, they created a system which made it possible for regular people to vote in the leadership election for the Liberal party. I felt that this was a good idea, and in 2012 I signed up to vote for the leader of the Liberal party. I ended up voting for Justin Trudeau to be the leader of the party, in particular because I agreed with his stances on legalizing marijuana as well as taking significant action to do something about climate change, in addition to his promise that he would reform the first-past-the-post voting system. I then voted for the Liberal party in the 2015 election, in which the Liberal party won a majority government. Unfortunately, while the party did legalize marijuana, in the end they decided not to do anything about the first-past-the-post voting system, which I found somewhat frustrating.

Avalon Microelectronics

As I mentioned previously, the first job I had after graduating from university was a job at Avalon Microelectronics, which was a small business based in Newfoundland. They offered me the job because I had already worked there as a student for my last three work terms while I was still finishing my degree. My first work term started in April 2008. After I graduated, I started working there as a regular employee in May 2010.

Avalon Microelectronics was a company that designed RTL for using FPGAs to process data in OTN networks. The most important project that I worked on while I was there was an RTL block that was used to process the overhead data for each OTN frame as it arrived at the network interface.

When I first learned about the overhead-processing project, it was actually a project that a small group of people at the company had already started working on, and they had an initial design. It seemed like an interesting problem to try to solve. The block had to do something fairly complicated and there were a large number of ways it could be designed.

I started thinking about how I would design the block if I were designing it myself. I realized that I had a few ideas for how to design the block so that it would be significantly smaller than the block that the team was already working on. I started to get excited about my ideas, and I wanted to try to create a prototype myself to see if it would work. Over a weekend, in my spare time, I created my prototype. When I started work again the next Monday, I showed the team what I had made. It seemed like they were pleased that I was helping them.

On some level, I suspected that I had done something that was likely to be frustrating to the others on the team. I was not sure what I should do about this. I really wanted to design the block. I suppose I could have told them my ideas before implementing it myself, however they might not have implemented it the way that I wanted to implement it, and if they implemented it, they would get the credit and people might not realize that I had a good idea.

After I showed them my code, since I had written so much and it replaced a lot of what they had already written, we decided that we would use my code and I would take ownership of the block. The team members that had been working on it were assigned to do other work. I felt concerned that I might have annoyed people, however they did not seem annoyed. I tried to compensate by being friendly with people, especially at social gatherings when we were drinking alcohol. I personally do not think I have an alcohol problem in general, however I do enjoy drinking beer at group events.

I remember that after I started at Avalon Microelectronics, a few people I knew from university also started working there. I remember that at one point, I was trying to refer to marijuana when I was talking to my friends at work, and to do that I referenced the number 420, which is a common code word used to refer to marijuana. One of the managers at work asked me what it meant, and I decided to be mysterious and not explain what it meant. I do not know if they looked up the definition after I mentioned it. If they did not, I am not sure what they thought I meant.

Moving to Toronto

Less than a year after I started working at Avalon Microelectronics as a regular employee, the company was acquired by Altera. Altera was a much larger company and had an office in Toronto. After I had been working for Altera in Newfoundland for a while, I looked at the jobs that were available at the Toronto office, thinking that I might be able to transfer to that office, and move to Toronto.

It appeared that the Toronto office was mostly based around people working on Quartus, the software that was used to compile RTL so that it could be executed on an FPGA. One of the open roles at the Toronto office was to work on the OpenCL compiler, which allowed people to program the FPGA using OpenCL rather than a traditional language like Verilog or VHDL. This sounded pretty interesting to me. CPUs could be programmed with many different programming languages, and it seemed like this might be a reason that CPUs were much more widely-used than FPGAs. I decided that I wanted to apply for the open role. However, I decided not apply for the role right away due to the fact that I had decided to wait until my girlfriend had finished her masters degree before moving to Toronto. Unfortunately, by the time that I was able to apply for the job opening that I saw, it was gone. Someone else in the Newfoundland office applied for the job before I could, and was accepted for the role.

When the time came that I actually could move to Toronto, the job opening at the Toronto office that seemed the most interesting to me was working on the timing analysis software that was part of Quartus. I had used the timing analyzer in order to optimize the RTL code that I had written for my job at Avalon Microelectronics, and it seemed like it was a complicated piece of software that might be interesting to learn how it worked. It was written in C++, and I liked that I would gain work experience working on software, which I had previously only done as a hobby in my spare time. I did an internal job interview for the position in order to prove that I was able to code in C++, and then they accepted me for the role. In order to prepare for the job, I did a Coursera course on the algorithms used in EDA tools, which had a section on timing analysis (part 1, part 2).

Once I had been accepted for the position on the timing analysis team, and I knew that I was going to move to Toronto, another thing that I did while I was still in Newfoundland was to apply to do a masters degree at the University of Toronto. I knew that if I did the degree part time while I was working at Altera, that Altera would pay for the tuition. Moving to Toronto was actually something that I had been thinking about for a very long time, ever since I was very young. I did not have negative feelings about Newfoundland, however I really liked the idea of living in a big city, and in particular being able to live in a high rise with lots of people around. When I was in high school, many years previously, I had read the website for the University of Toronto and had thought about what it would be like to do my undergraduate degree there. I did not have any regrets about staying in Newfoundland for my undergraduate degree, as it was a positive experience and I had a lot of positive memories from it, however I was excited to have the opportunity to have a second university experience, and to be able to follow though on my long-term goal of moving to Toronto and living in a big city. I then moved to Toronto in 2013.

Even though I was excited to move to the big city, I planned to visit Newfoundland regularly. After I moved, I ended up coming back to Newfoundland to visit every Christmas, and eventually I started trying to think of ways that I could come back for extended visits longer than the Christmas break. I still valued the social connections and the friends that I had in Newfoundland, and I liked thinking of myself as a Newfoundlander.

After moving to Toronto, I unfortunately gained back some of the weight that I had lost in Newfoundland after graduating from university. This was due to the change in lifestyle and schedule. I did not like this, and I started trying to think of ways that I could lose weight again.

Timing Analysis

Working on a timing analyzer turned out to be fairly interesting. I liked that the software was complicated, and that it involved modelling something that was physically happening inside the chip. I learned a bunch of things about how to write optimized C++ code. I remember rewriting the path finding algorithm used in the report_timing command.

Shortly after starting on the timing analysis team, my manager sent me to a tau conference in Santa Cruz, California where people did presentations on various topics related to timing analysis. I enjoyed the trip. It was the first time that I travelled to another country by myself. The weather was nice. The conference took place in a hotel near the beach, and the presentations were done in a room which had large windows which looked out onto the beach. While I was in California, I also rented a car and drove to Mountain View, where I visited the Computer History Museum, and saw the outside of the Google headquarters. It was a great trip.

Once I had moved to Toronto, it quickly became time to start doing my masters degree part time. I did the degree by doing one course at a time in my spare time, while I worked full-time at Altera. It was a bit stressful to do the courses while I was working at the same time, however I very much enjoyed having another area of Toronto to explore, and having some more unique experiences.

There were two courses that I did for my degree while I was on the timing analysis team. The first course was a course on FPGA architecture. I had to write a term paper for the course. I decided to write a paper that summarized and compared three other papers that were on the topic of timing analysis.

The second course was on GPU programming. This course had a group project that I had to do with another person. I ended up forming a group with another person who was also doing their degree part-time while working at Altera. For our project, we attempted to create a timing analyzer that was accelerated by writing versions of it in OpenCL so that it could be run on either a GPU or an FPGA. I was responsible for the GPU implementation while my group partner was responsible for the FPGA implementation. It was partially successful. I wrote a page on the internal wiki at Altera on the school project so that I could describe it to people at work.

One unfortunate memory that I have from the time that I worked on the timing analyzer occurred after I had returned from my trip to California to attend the tau conference. My manager asked me to do a presentation on the conference to the rest of the people in the Toronto office after I returned. I had seen a few presentations on timing analysis at the conference while I was there, and my manager wanted me to summarize some of the presentations and the academic papers that they were based on. I was a bit nervous doing the presentation because many of the concepts that I had seen presented at the conference were new to me. I decided to be honest during my presentation about which things I understood well and which things I did not. At one point I was describing the concepts behind a paper that someone else had written, and the paper referred to dynamic programming, and I remember commenting that I was not sure what it was. The memory stuck out to me because I feel that I am good at programming, and when I looked up the term afterwords I realized that I did actually understand the concept and would have been able to apply it if I had been working on a problem where it was required, I had just not been familiar with the term. I was not sure how others interpreted my presentation.

High Level Design

After I worked on the timing analysis team for a while, a job opening appeared on the team that was working on the OpenCL compiler. This was the team that I originally had been planning to try to join when I was still in Newfoundland. I still thought it would be interesting to work on the project. The team was called the High Level Design (HLD) team.

The way the OpenCL project worked, an FPGA was designed to always be paired with a CPU which ran a standard operating system, like Windows or Linux. The CPU was responsible for programming the FPGA and transferring data between the FPGA and CPU. There was a runtime and device driver which ran on the CPU in order to perform these functions. The job opening on the HLD team was to work on the runtime and device driver. I decided to apply for the opening and switch to the team. I was actually more interested in working on the OpenCL compiler itself, however I figured that I could spend some time working on the runtime and then change teams later.

I did a course for my degree around this time on parallel programming. This course had a term project which required that I code something and write a report on it. I chose to do a project which attempted to accelerate an FPGA place and route algorithm by writing the algorithm in OpenCL and running on the FPGA.

I did another course for my degree around this time on machine learning, which I found quite difficult. The course made use of a lot of mathematical concepts which I was not familiar with. In addition to that, I did not have very much time to study for the course due to the fact that I was working full time. When the course was finished, the students were asked to submit feedback about the course and the professors that taught it. I was very frustrated with how difficult I found the course, and from what I can recall I think I left some negative feedback which was somewhat harsh. I now feel bad about the feedback that I gave because I do not think they really deserved it. It is much easier to be harsh when you are stressed and are giving feedback to someone that you cannot see. In retrospect, I am glad that I did the course. Even though it was difficult, I very much appreciate that I had the opportunity to learn the material, as it was actually interesting.

During the time that I worked on the runtime team, Altera ended up getting acquired by Intel and was renamed to Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG). I felt that this was pretty cool, because Intel was a well-known company that more people would have heard of if I told them where I worked. Altera was a well-known company as well, however it was moreso well-known amongst people who used FPGAs, while Intel had ads on television and sold CPUs directly to regular people. When I was younger, I had gone on a trip to California with my family and we had visited the gift shop and visitor area at the Intel headquarters, which was a positive memory for me. For a long time, I used to have an Intel bunny keychain, which I think might have been purchased at the gift ship. I also had memories of reading the Intel x86 architecture manuals when I was younger, and I liked that I would now be working at the company that designed the x86 architecture. I was therefore pleased with the acquisition.

I worked on the runtime team for less than a year. After that, a new project was started that was going to try to use FPGAs to accelerate the execution of artificial neural networks, and they asked me to join the team.

Deep Learning Accelerator

The team that I joined next was the team that eventually became called the Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA) team. When I joined, there was one person on the team already who had written a significant amount of code in OpenCL. At that point, the code was able to execute enough of a neural network to prove that the concept would work, however many things were incomplete and the code was not optimized. My job was to help finish the implementation in OpenCL and optimize the code.

I spent a significant amount of effort writing code for this project. Just over a year after I started working on the project, I broke up with my girlfriend who had moved from Newfoundland to Toronto with me. The reason for the breakup was not related to my work, however after it occurred I had a lot more time to work on the project, because I could work on it on evenings and weekends.

There were a lot of optimization opportunities on this project. The OpenCL compiler was functional, however unless you knew how to write OpenCL code in just the right way, it tended to generate very unoptimized RTL. I started to become good at writing OpenCL code in a specific coding style which allowed me to mostly be able to create any arbitrary circuit. Sometimes other people on the team would write an initial version of a block in a coding style which was intended to be clear and easy to understand, and then I would do a bunch of modifications to their code which looked complicated because I was actually trying to cause the OpenCL compiler to create a specific RTL circuit. Usually whenever I did this, it would result in a large speedup that I was able to describe on a slide and tell people about in our group meeting. I found this very motivating.

During the time that I worked on the DLA team I was still finishing my masters degree at the University of Toronto, and in order to finish the degree I had to do a large project which would take multiple terms to complete. I ended up joining a group of a few other people that were already working on a project to use FPGAs to analyze the propagation of radioactive particles in a cancer treatment machine. My role on the project was fairly minimal, and unfortunately I did not have a significant amount of time to dedicate to the project due to the fact that I was also working full time at Intel PSG, and was very enthusiastic about the DLA project, which I was also working on in my spare time at home. However, as part of my work on the school project, I did learn how to use Bluespec SystemVerilog, which is a language that uses some ideas from Haskell and applies them to RTL design. I found it interesting to learn the language.

One thing that I discovered while working on the DLA team was that it was possible for me to walk to and from work by walking through a series of parks that were located between my apartment and the office. Conveniently, the office had a shower that I could use after I arrived. I started walking this route every time that I needed to go to the office. Not only did this help me lose weight, it was also relaxing to walk through parks every day and gave me a lot of time to think.

I remember that one point while I was working on the DLA team, I was walking to work, and I passed by someone on the sidewalk who was trying to convince people that abortion was wrong. To do so, they had a large sign with an image of an aborted fetus, which was unpleasant to see. Given that I felt like I had generally left-leaning views, which are usually associated with being in favour of legalized abortion, and because I felt annoyed by seeing the image, I showed them my middle finger as I was walking by. After I did this, I started feeling bad about it. With regards to the abortion debate, personally I actually feel like both sides have reasonable arguments and I felt like I probably looked like an asshole, especially because I was also wearing sunglasses at the time. In more recent times, I have been tempted to send similar kinds of disturbing images to people in order to convince them that innocent people are being killed in Gaza, and so I understand the mindset of the person with the anti-abortion sign. The memory stuck with me and I have tried to avoid being as harshly critical of the political opinions of other people in such a simplistic way ever since then.

Breaking Up

In November 2017, I broke up with my girlfriend who I had been dating for 10 years. This was an extremely difficult decision for me and I did not enjoy doing it. It was something that I had actually previously discussed with my girlfriend before we moved to Toronto, however I had changed my mind that time. Unfortunately, I had still been thinking about it after moving to Toronto. After a while, I decided that even though it would be extremely emotionally difficult, it would be better to break up rather than to prolong the relationship in an uncertain state, so that we would both have time to date other people. There were a few specific reasons that caused me to feel like I wanted to break up, and it seemed likely to me that if I dated other women that I might be able to meet someone who was a better match, especially in a big city like Toronto with so many people. I had not dated very many women while I lived in Newfoundland before meeting my long-term girlfriend.

I did not feel confident about the decision to break up, as there were actually many things that I did like about our relationship. I told her that I was still willing to be friends, though this was understandably difficult at the time that we broke up. It is still true that I am willing to be friends, though it seems like it would be better if I found a girlfriend first and was in a relationship myself before trying to be friends with my former girlfriend, especially given that she is herself no longer single.

Immediately after we broke up, my now-former girlfriend decided to move back to Newfoundland. I personally suspect that this made the experience more difficult for her, as it meant that many things about her life changed at the same time, including suddenly changing jobs. Unfortunately, it was probably difficult for her to afford living in Toronto by herself, and all of her friends and family lived in Newfoundland, who I suspect were encouraging her to move back. Since I was no longer her boyfriend and we had just broken up, I was not really in a position to give her advice. I personally would not have moved back, though I was also the one who originally wanted to move to Toronto in the first place, so it is possible that this was just something that we felt differently about. I am not sure how she currently feels about the fact that she moved back, however this at least is my perspective and how I view it.

After I became single, my life changed in a few significant ways. One of those was that I started putting a lot more effort into my appearance, because I was now trying to find another girlfriend. I had already recently lost weight due to walking to and from work, and in addition to that I decided to grow some facial hair and cut my hair shorter, and I bought some new clothes. I personally think that I did a reasonably good job at trying to look attractive and I think that I looked a lot more attractive than I did in high school and university. I remember that at one point, I was at work and one of the women who worked there called me "hot Shane", which made me feel good. However, it was also the beginning of an extremely stressful and sad period of my life, as I did not enjoy being single. I did not have anyone female to do activities with, have meals with, or to chat with. I have a lot of memories of walking to and from work while thinking about how much I wished that I had a girlfriend.

Dating Apps

I began using dating apps. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, dating apps do not work very well. Most dating apps use a swiping interface which only allows you to see one person at a time, and require you to make a decision about whether or not you like each person as soon as you see the profile, which are usually short and do not contain very much information. In particular, in a large city with millions of people, looking at completely random profiles one at a time seems like a slow way to find a good match. I had difficulty meeting anyone who I felt was remotely similar to the kind of woman who I felt that I wanted to be my girlfriend. Every time I went on a date I felt pressured to settle for the person that I had met, even though I always felt like I barely knew them. I felt like it was important that I find someone who was clearly a better match than my previous girlfriend, so that I could feel like breaking up was something that had been fully justified. I did not want to settle for someone just because I was tired of being single.

In my personal opinion, the way that most people appear to expect to date and find a significant other seems incorrect. I am not sure why the dating apps provide so little information and force you to only look at one profile at a time. In some ways, it seems like maybe the reason that they are implemented this way is because they are intended to be hookup apps in which people are expecting to only find short-term relationships that do not last very long. However, personally even if that was my goal I would still want more information and would want to be able to see more than one profile at a time. In my opinion, the best dating app is actually GitHub, or any other service which lets you host a personal website, and people should just make regular websites containing their dating profile, similar to the profile that I have on my website. If a lot of people did this, it would be possible for someone to build a search engine that would index all of the dating profiles on websites and create a search interface that could let people filter based on age and location and other kinds of information. Maybe one reason that this is not done is because it is not as profitable as a dating app which makes it difficult to find a girlfriend and forces you to take a long time to find a good match. I suppose there are privacy concerns with that approach, however as far as I can tell the current system encourages people to create things like the Tea app and the "Are We Dating The Same Guy" Facebook groups in which people post personal information about other people in a semi-public place without verifying it, so at least with a public website everyone can see the same information. The fact that these semi-public places let someone search by name and look at information about more than one person at a time seems like it is a sign that the interface in the regular dating apps is not sufficient.

After breaking up with my long-term girlfriend, it took me a while to go on an actual date with someone that I had met from a dating app. I did not do this until May 2018, when I finally went on a date with someone to watch a Blue Jays game at the Left Field Brewery. It seemed like the date went reasonably well. I enjoyed chatting with the woman that I had met and being on a date. However, after the date was over we did not message each other again. This felt a little bit awkward, however it seemed to me like this was inevitably going to happen often, as I felt like it was going to be important to be able to date a variety of different women in order to be confident that I had met a good match. It seemed like it was unlikely that I would be able to start a serious relationship with the first person that I had gone on a date with, or even the first few people.

Trip to Vancouver

Before going on any more dates after the one at Left Field Brewery, I had preexisting plans that occupied my time in August 2018. A friend of mine was getting married, and the wedding was going to take place in Vancouver, where he and his fiance had moved. My friend asked me to be the best man at the wedding, which caused me to experience a little bit of anxiety as I had to prepare a speech. I did not actually start writing the speech until I was in Vancouver, which made it somewhat more difficult due to the fact that it did not give me as much time to write the speech, however it also meant that I could ask my friends for help writing it while we were hanging out in Vancouver. In the end, I think it worked out okay and the speech sounded reasonable.

After the wedding was over, I had some time to explore Vancouver by myself. I had hoped that my friends would stick around after the wedding, however I ended up being the only one who stayed behind. One of the things that I did was to walk around Stanley Park. When I first started to walk around the park, I saw that there was a place to rent a bicycle, which I considered, however I had not ridden a bike in a long time so I decided to walk. It turned out that it took a long time to walk around Stanley Park, so I quickly understood why the bicycles had been available for rent. I enjoyed the walk anyway, even though I was not able to walk around the entire circumference of the park.

After this, I rented a car in order to visit various tourist sites. I first drove to the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park, and walked across the bridge in addition to visiting the nearby tourist areas. I then visited Capilano River Regional Park and explored some of the trails there as well. After I had finished exploring the area around the Capilano River, the next day I drove to the Sea to Sky Gondola and used the gondola to travel up the side of Mount Habrich. It was a scenic and enjoyable experience. After this I returned the rental car.

The last area in Vancouver that I visited was Granville Island, which I did on my final day before flying back to Toronto. There were breweries located on the island and I became somewhat intoxicated in the middle of the day while drinking beer. It was highly enjoyable. Overall, the trip was a positive experience, though there were many points at which I wished that I had someone to experience the trip with me.

After I returned to Toronto, I reflected on the fact that I had not rented a bicycle in order to travel around Stanley Park. It seemed like it might have been more enjoyable to ride around the park on a bike, because there was a wide, paved path that provided a lot of room to ride a bicycle without worrying about cars. When I was younger and lived in Manuels, I had ridden a bike often, however once I had moved to St. John's this had become much more difficult due to the fact that there was often traffic on the streets which made it feel dangerous. I did some research, and I realized that Toronto had some trails and other places where it seemed like bikes could be ridden without worrying about cars. I therefore decided to buy a bicycle.

The bicycle was a great purchase and I have now had many enjoyable memories riding it. It is possible to travel pretty far along the edge of Lake Ontario on the Waterfront Trail without encountering very many cars.

More Dates

After I returned from Vancouver I went on a few more dates, however most of the time I would not end up going on a second date after going on the first date. At one point, in December 2018, I went on a date at The Mugshot Tavern with a woman who was in police school to become a police officer, which I thought was interesting due to her profession. In June 2019, I went on a date with an Asian woman who brought me to PaPa Spicy in Chinatown, because she knew that I liked spicy food. The food at the restaurant was really, really good. She told me that this was called Hunan food.

In November 2019, I went on a date with someone who grew up in Ontario, however her family had originally immigrated from a country in South Asia. She suggested that we attend a paint night event, which took place in a pub and involved both of us trying to paint the same painting which was copied from an example painting that they had at the front of the room, while also being able to drink beer at the same time.

I enjoyed the date with this woman, and we ended up going on multiple dates. She had dark brown skin. On one of our dates, she told me a story about how she and her friends had rented a cottage somewhere in Ontario and had encountered someone who they felt was racist. I believed her story, though I was surprised because it seemed like there were a lot of immigrants in Toronto and Ontario and people seemed very tolerant.

The Offer

In January 2019, I was contacted by a former manager from the DLA team who had left Intel PSG to become a manager at Tenstorrent, an AI chip startup that had been started in Toronto. The company had already hired a few people from the team that I was on at Intel PSG, and the manager at Tenstorrent tried to convince me to join them at Tenstorrent. In order to convince me, he showed me a paper that Intel PSG had published which had two versions. My name appeared in the version that was published first, however it appeared to have been intentionally removed in the updated version. He told me that this showed what the people at Intel PSG actually thought about me, and implied that it meant that they secretly disliked me.

I was very surprised to see this paper, because the core ideas from the paper were ideas that I had personally come up with myself, and I had no idea that Intel PSG had been publishing papers on the topic. It was very strange to see that my name had been removed from the updated version. It did seem like it was proof that someone disliked me, because it did not seem like there was any other way to explain why my name had been removed. It was a very strange feeling, because at work, everyone had been acting friendly and had not said anything which indicated that there were any problems, social or otherwise. It was a little bit hard to believe, and yet I had proof. I was not sure what emotions I should feel about it. The situation was made more difficult due to the fact that I did not have anyone to discuss my feelings with.

Unfortunately, learning that people might secretly dislike me at Intel PSG ended up not being something that made me feel confident about joining the startup. I liked the stability at Intel PSG, and aside from what this paper implied about what others thought about me, I liked my job there. The startup seemed risky. The person that I knew at Tenstorrent offered to give me a salary of $150,000 (CAD) a year, and equity in the company valued at $200,000 (CAD). I decided to ask him if they were able to give me a salary of $165,000 (CAD) and equity valued at $500,000 (CAD). I felt that if I was being asked to do something risky, then it should mean that I should be paid a large amount of money in order to do it. I asked for more equity rather than a lot more salary, because I figured startups usually had more equity that they could give out while cash was probably more difficult. However, even though I made the counteroffer, I still felt very uncomfortable about leaving Intel PSG and was not sure if I would really do it even if the counteroffer was accepted.

Before hearing back from Tenstorrent about my counteroffer, I decided to tell a higher-level manager at Intel PSG that they were offering me a job at Tenstorrent. I figured that I would find out if the people at Intel PSG would try to convince me to stay. We talked about things that I could work on in the future if I stayed, and at one point I mentioned the idea of designing a programming language. At the time, I had been writing code for DLA in a combination of OpenCL and SystemVerilog using a compiler that another team at Intel PSG had created. I had some ideas for a custom language based on what I had learned.

After the conversation with the higher-level manager at Intel PSG, I then talked to the person that I knew at Tenstorrent again about his job offer. Unfortunately, when I spoke to him again he told me that he had changed his mind. He told me that he felt that I did not accept top-down direction, and that he was worried that he might have to lay me off if I got a job at Tenstorrent. He told me that he thought that I would be better off staying at Intel PSG. After this, I am pretty sure that he then specifically mentioned that one of the reasons that I should stay at Intel PSG was because I could create my own programming language at Intel PSG. This happened to be a specific idea that I had recently discussed with the higher-level manager at Intel PSG, making it seem possible that they had recently communicated with each other. The reference to the programming language by the person that I knew at at Tenstorrent is a vague memory that I feel somewhat unsure of in retrospect because it was not something that I paid attention to closely at the time, however it is not the only interaction that I have had with managers and former managers that causes me to suspect that they communicate between companies about people that they are hiring, and so it seems reasonably possible that I am remembering it accurately.

Once I had been told that the Tenstorrent job offer was being rescinded, I felt a little bit relieved that the decision about whether to leave Intel PSG had been taken out of my hands. To be fair to the person that I knew at Tenstorrent, I had actually started to feel very overwhelmed and anxious from trying to decide whether to accept the offer, and it was possible that this was something that he was able to perceive. However, staying at Intel PSG was also very stressful because it meant that I was forced to stay at a company where it seemed like people disliked me while not being willing to tell me the reason why. I told people at Intel PSG about the paper, however it did not seem like anyone truly empathized with my concerns. The managers seemed to mostly treat the fact that I was upset about it as the problem, rather than the fact that my name had been removed in the first place. They seemed like they just wanted the problem to go away and for me to stop talking about it. My direct manager at Intel PSG told me that he was the one who had removed my name, and apologized to me, however he did not explain the reason why he had done it. I was not sure what to do. I did not want to change teams as I had an important role and was enjoying my work on the project. After a while, I just stopped thinking about it and tried to pretend that it did not happen.

Much later, the person that I knew at Tenstorrent did try again to convince me to join the company, however I still had the same problem of feeling that working at Intel PSG meant that I was working for the stable company where I was unlikely to get laid off, while Tenstorrent was the startup where it was possible that I could be laid off at any time. Interestingly, it has now been many years since I was first offered the job in 2019, and as of writing this description, the company still exists, so maybe the job security would actually have been fine.

More recently I happened to read the Wikipedia article for block floating point, which was a concept that I had discovered and implemented myself for the DLA project and was one of the main ideas from the paper in which my name had been removed, and saw that the Tenstorrent chip is listed in the article as an example of a hardware implementation. This makes it seem possible that they are using the idea after hearing about it from my work on the DLA project. They did try to hire me, so they were trying to be fair, assuming that the DLA project was where they heard of the idea, though I have to admit that I find it a little bit frustrating that I have not been able to financially benefit from this fact during the last few years that I have been unemployed.

Staying at Intel PSG

Aside from concerns about being laid off, one of the main reasons that I had found it difficult to immediately accept the Tenstorrent job offer was due to the physical location of the Intel PSG office in Toronto. The office, which in more recent times is once again the Altera office, is located in a really nice area of downtown Toronto. It is close to restaurants, multiple subway stations, and most importantly for me, there happens to be a walking trail that passes mostly through parks that I can use to walk to the office from my apartment. By walking this trail to and from work every day, I had managed to lose a significant amount of weight. After learning about my name being removed from the Intel PSG paper, it might have made sense to consider other jobs, however I really wanted to continue working at the physical Intel PSG office. It seemed like it would be difficult for any other company to be able to compete with the location.

I tried to continue working on the DLA team normally. At one point, my manager held a meeting to discuss the technical direction of the DLA project. He had created slides to describe the technical work that he felt needed to be done next. As I watched the presentation, I started to feel frustrated. I had written a lot of the code that was being referred to in the presentation, and I disagreed with many of the things being described in the slides. It did not seem like they could be implemented the way that they were being described. I objected strongly during the meeting. Unfortunately, everyone else in the meeting was in a physical meeting room while I had called in remotely, and so I was unable to tell how others were perceiving what I was saying. Nobody else in the meeting spoke up to give their opinion. Eventually, I gave up and stopped debating the issue. I felt frustrated about this meeting, and from later interactions with my manager I could tell that he was frustrated as well.

Another time, I had a meeting with a different manager on the DLA team. In this meeting, I had been trying to communicate and resolve the problems that I had been having with the managers on the DLA team that made it seem like they did not like me. This manager tried to give me some feedback. He told me that he felt that I often did things just so that I could say "I told you so" and that others did not like it when I did this. It was actually useful feedback in the sense that it made it easier for me to understand how others saw me, though I did feel like it was a bit unfair.

The COVID-19 pandemic started at the end of 2019. I had already been spending a lot of time alone in my apartment due to being single, and the pandemic made it worse. Every minute that I was not in a video chat with someone else was a minute I was spending alone in my apartment and unable to leave. I spent a lot of time worrying about my social relationships and convincing people to want to continue socializing with me.

After the pandemic started to become less intense, and it became more accepted for people to leave their homes for recreational events, I remember that I was riding my bike at one point and I started to realize that I was spending a lot of time thinking about the woman that I had done the paint night event with. After a few dates, we had stopped messaging each other, however I liked her personality and to be honest after a while I realized that I found her skin color very attractive. In July 2020, I sent her a text message to see if she might be interested in meeting again. Unfortunately, she told me that she was seeing someone else at that point. I was sad about this. After this point, when I was using dating apps, I started to prefer trying to meet woman who also had a darker skin color.

Office Gossip

Around October 2020, I had a conversation with my manager at Intel PSG. He asked me about someone else on the team, and asked me if I thought that the other person on the team was looking for a new job. The person that he asked about was a friend of mine from Newfoundland that I had helped get a job at Intel PSG when he was moving to Toronto. The question made me really uncomfortable. The truth was that I did know that he was looking for a new job, however I did not know why my manager was asking and I was concerned that if I told the truth that there might be negative repercussions for the person that I knew from Newfoundland. I tried to avoid answering the question, however I suspected that my manager could tell that the answer was yes from my reaction and the way that I tried to avoid answering the question. In retrospect, it was kind of interesting that my manager asked the question about someone for whom the answer was yes. I wonder if my manager had already been told by someone else, or if he had simply guessed correctly.

Some time after this, my team at Intel PSG was told that multiple senior people on the team were quitting, including my manager. It was a significant change and it was not clear how the team would be run after they were gone. I became concerned that it might be a sign that layoffs were coming soon, and that the people who stayed on the team might end up getting laid off.

I had a chat with my manager. He had not officially told the team what his new job would be, however he told me that he was going to be opening an office in Toronto for something related to Google. He told me that I could look it up on LinkedIn if I was really interested. He told me that he told his manager that he thought that the person that I knew from Newfoundland, who he had asked about previously, was looking for a job outside of Intel. He implied that he knew this based on my previous response when I was asked about it, and he apologized for telling his manager based on my response. He told me that he did not tell his manager my name. He told me not to worry, and suggested that the person that I knew from Newfoundland might be given stocks, and might be treated better by his new manager. I interpreted this to be a sign that the person that I knew from Newfoundland was now going to be laid off as a consequence of how I responded when my manager asked if he was looking for a job. I found this stressful. I did not want to be responsible for anyone getting laid off who did not want to be laid off. Sometimes people who are looking for a new job want to be laid off in order to receive severance before starting their new job, however I did not know if this was the case for the person that I knew from Newfoundland. The person that I knew from Newfoundland seemed like he might not been working at Intel long enough to receive severance. I suspected that my manager might have been motivated by a desire to intentionally create a situation in which I would be more socially isolated at work due to the fact that the person that I knew from Newfoundland had been laid off, and was additionally trying to cause me to feel bad about it if it occurred.

These events occurred during the COVID pandemic. Before the pandemic, I had been regularly trying to organize people to have drinks after work every two weeks at one of the restaurants near the office. Once the pandemic started, this social group switched to having regular online video chats instead. This was personally very beneficial for me at the time, as I am single and live alone, and so during the COVID pandemic, any time that I was not having a video chat with someone was time that I was spending completely alone in my apartment. It was one of the only ways to see any humans at all.

After the senior members on the team quit, others started to follow. The social video chats continued, however, with many of the same people in them even though they worked at different companies. I felt extremely worried that I had made a comment to my manager at Intel PSG that was going to cause the person that I knew from Newfoundland to get laid off, who I had no idea if they actually wanted to be laid off. I told someone about it in one of the video chats who was previously a manager at Intel PSG however had quit and had since gotten a job at a different company.

I found these events stressful, and so in November 2020, I found a therapist online who was willing to do video chats and started paying her to chat with me regularly. The therapist that I found was someone who told me that she had actually worked at a tech company before, which I appreciated because the main thing that I wanted to chat about was stress associated with work. I chatted with her regularly until August 2021 and talked to her about a variety of things, though in particular I chatted with her about the stress associated with changing jobs. She was friendly and it was helpful to have someone female to chat with, however eventually I stopped chatting with her because it was costing a lot of money and I started to become worried that the fact that I was paying her might cause her to humour me and just say whatever was necessary to cause me to keep paying for more sessions. I felt like I really needed to find an actual girlfriend.

Leaving Intel PSG

Given that everyone else on the team appeared to be quitting, and it appeared that layoffs might be coming, I started to become worried that I could be laid off as well. In addition, other people on the team who had quit had been getting jobs at various AI startups that were opening offices in Toronto. I felt that I liked the idea of working on something interesting and potentially making a lot of money. The timing also seemed like it made sense, as it had started to become difficult to find opportunities to significantly increase the performance of the DLA code without starting to modify the mathematics behind the neural networks themselves or switching to another chip besides an FPGA. I had actually been starting to spend a lot of time on a Python-based testing framework for DLA, in order to improve the performance of running the tests, rather than trying to significantly improve the performance of DLA itself.

I decided to apply for jobs at Groq, Cerebras, Tenstorrent, and Untether AI. All of these companies had employees who used to work at Intel PSG that I at least somewhat knew, which made them appealing. Groq and Cerebras were the companies that I was the most interested in, as I had read about their chip architectures and felt that they had some innovative ideas. Groq had a method of increasing the density of the multipliers on their chip that seemed innovative, while Cerebras was increasing the total size of their chip so that they could fit more multipliers onto one chip without increasing the density. Both of these approaches seemed like they could improve performance. Tenstorrent still seemed appealing because I knew a bunch of the people who worked there, however as far as I was aware their architecture seemed like it would have a multiplier density that would probably not be any better than the multiplier density of a GPU, so it was not as clear that there might be a significant performance advantage over the GPUs that already existed. Untether had an architecture that involved a memory optimization that I did not understand very well. I think they were trying to put their multipliers closer to memory in order to reduce power usage, however it seemed like they were doing something unique at the ASIC level with memory cells, and I had never worked on an ASIC before, so it was not clear to me whether that was a big deal or not. In any case, they had the fewest number of people working there that I knew as well as seeming to have the least funding, which made me less interested.

Unfortunately, even though I felt that the interview went well at Cerebras, I did not receive an offer from the company. I did receive a job offer from Groq, however this was the company where my manager from Intel PSG, who had removed my name from the paper that Intel PSG had published and appeared to have intentionally tried to cause the person that I knew from Newfoundland to be laid off, had gotten a job. In addition, accepting the offer would mean that I would report to him again and so he would still be my manager. I had mixed feelings, though in the end I decided to accept the offer. I knew some of other people on the team, who I thought might back me up if I had disagreements with my manager, and I had a positive impression of the senior management at the company. Many of them had previously worked at Google, which caused me to suspect that it would probably be a professionally run company.

Not long after accepting the offer from Groq, it became time to travel back to Newfoundland for Christmas, as I normally did every year. I decided to visit the Intel PSG office in person one last time before flying back to Newfoundland in order to collect my personal possessions that were at my desk. While I was there, I started to feel nostalgic and felt sad that I would not work in that particular office anymore. There was nobody else in the office at the time, so I decided to walk around and take a few photos of the office for nostalgic reasons. I took photos of the views out of the windows, and looked at the CN Tower. I felt sad and hoped that I was making the correct decision by changing jobs.

After I flew back to Newfoundland, I started feeling even more anxious about changing jobs. My daily walking route between my apartment and the Intel PSG office was something that I valued a lot. Walking this route every day was one of the only ways that I had found to successfully lose weight. In addition to that, many of my memories of Toronto were centered around places near the office. I started to become worried that I was giving up something valuable, and started to think that maybe things were not so bad at Intel PSG.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the probability of being laid off if I changed my mind and chose not to quit my job at Intel PSG. I knew that at Intel PSG, my name had been removed from the paper that had been published about work that I had done. However, my manager, who had admitted to being the one to actually remove my name from the paper, had left Intel, and there were a lot of people at Intel PSG who knew me and knew that I had technical skills. It seemed like that might protect me and make it more difficult for someone to harm my reputation and claim that I should be laid off. I also started to feel anxious changing to a new company where only a small group of people knew who I was, especially because my manager from Intel PSG would be working there, and I was not sure if the other people that I knew from Intel PSG would really back me up if people started criticizing me behind my back.

I was so unsure about my decision to leave Intel PSG that I contacted Groq and told them that I had changed my mind about accepting their offer. However, this did not make me feel better. I knew that backing out of a job offer after accepting it was something that companies generally did not view positively, and so I felt bad about that. In addition, I also immediately started to feel anxious from worrying that layoffs might be coming soon at Intel PSG, and again started to be worried that I might be a prime target to be laid off. I was not sure what I should do.

I also started to have another problem. Thinking that I was quitting Intel PSG soon, I had copied personal files off of my work laptop. Most of the files were very obviously personal. However, for some of the files, I started to become concerned that if someone could tell that I had copied them that they might have thought that I was copying work files that I was not allowed to take with me. I started to become worried that Intel might have some kind of monitoring software on their laptops, and that people at Intel might see what I had copied, without me having the opportunity to explain or defend myself. I started to become worried that this was another reason that I could be laid off if I stayed at Intel PSG.

These are the files that I copied from my Intel laptop:

• A bunch of files that were obviously personal and had absolutely nothing to do with work, like receipts from buying stuff online
• Photos of group events with my coworkers, some of which took place inside the Intel office, like photos of the Christmas parties
• A screenshot of an email that was about organizing people to meet for drinks after work
• An image graphic that I had used as a header when I sent emails organizing people to meet for drinks after work which said "A message from Shane O'Connell" and was made to look similar to the image headers that higher-up executives in the company used to send when they sent emails to a lot of people at the same time, and included a photo of myself drinking a beer
• A page from the internal Intel wiki that I had written about a school project that I had done on timing analysis, which was somewhat related to work, however it was definitely a school project and was never used for anything related to work
• A text file containing a draft of an email that I had started to write to a director at the company about a school project
• The presentation that I gave to the rest of the office about what I had seen at the TAU conference in 2014
• Some academic papers on topics related to my work that were written by people outside of Intel which seemed like they were probably possible to obtain on the public Internet anyway
• A copy of my internal employment information from the Workday HR system
• A screenshot of my terminal that I had taken in 2014 in order to show how I had set up vim and tmux, and unfortunately does include some lines of source code in the screenshot, however it is not an important section of the code and my intent at the time had been to create an image showing how my work environment had been set up rather than to try to capture important code
• One PowerPoint slide that had been saved as a JPEG file and mixed in with some personal files which I copied by mistake and deleted as soon as I realized that I had copied it
• A password-protected PDF containing information about a patent application in which I had been listed as the author of the patent, which had been granted by the time that I left Intel and so the information in the PDF was public information
• A short part of the conversation that I had with my manager in which it seemed like he was trying to make me feel bad by making it appear that someone that I knew in the office would be laid off as a consequence of something that I had said

Now that some time has passed and I understand the law a bit better, as far as I understand it, the only kind of law which might arguably apply to any of these files is copyright law. Apparently, copying the files from my work computer to my personal computer does count as making a copy under copyright law, however for each of the cases above I believe it is possible to make a good argument that copying the file could be considered fair use, especially because I was only making the copy for personal archival use and my copy should have no impact on the ability of Intel to make money. In each of the cases above, I have not given copies of the files to anyone else, though unfortunately I suspect that I might have privately sent the screenshot of my terminal in 2014 to a few friends at the time that I took the screenshot, thinking that I was showing off that I had an important job writing code. It seems like it might be possible to argue that making that copy was fair use as well, though I admit that it was not a very good idea.

When considering these files in an ethical sense not related to the law, or in the sense of doing something which is technically legal however would be viewed negatively by Intel or future employers, I feel like I did not do anything significantly wrong, and I hope other people would agree with this, or at least agree that I should be able to make a mistake of this magnitude without it ending my career and causing me to be deemed untrustworthy. My intent at the time that I saved these files was just to preserve some personal files for nostalgic reasons, or because they seemed like important documentation, like the Workday HR employment information or the short conversation with my manager, and I was for sure trying to leave Intel on good terms in a way that might allow me to possibly work there again. With regards to the screenshot that I took in 2014 that I might have shared at the time, I completely recognize that it was a bad idea, and I would for sure not share anything similar to that in the future if I were in a similar situation again.

However, even though I am pretty sure that I did not do anything illegal or significantly objectionable, at the time that I was thinking about the issue in 2020, I was extremely worried about it. I was not sure how someone at Intel might interpret the fact that I had copied these things. I struggled with the decision for a long time. I discussed the issue with my family, however they were not really able to help and did not have any suggestions.

Eventually, I decided that it would be better to work for Groq. I decided that both options had risk, and I felt that I did want to work on what seemed like the more exciting and interesting project. I contacted them again, and asked them if they would allow me to accept the offer again, even though I had previously changed my mind. They told me that this was fine and that I could still accept the offer. I then contacted Intel PSG and gave my official notice that I intended to quit my job.

Unfortunately, even after accepting the job at Groq and giving official notice to Intel PSG, I was still unsure of my decision. During my last week at Intel PSG, I agonized over it. I had a video chat with one of the managers on the DLA team about it almost every day. It was very important to me that the people at Intel PSG still be willing to hire me back again someday, and I told this to the manager at Intel PSG often. I told the manager on the DLA team that I was worried that the executives at Intel PSG disliked me, and that they were going to put a "do not rehire" entry into the Intel HR system, which would have made it difficult for people at Intel to hire me back again. The manager on the DLA team reassured me. They told me that there were a lot of people at Intel PSG that knew me, and that even if the computer system said "do not rehire", that it would be easy to override it and rehire me if I was going to return.

Making a decision on whether or not to accept the offer from Groq was very stressful, which I expressed to my family while I was visiting Newfoundland. The stress was so bad that my parents suggested that I talk to a doctor about being prescribed medication. The doctor ended up prescribing me some kind of antidepressant. When I took the pills, my body felt physically uncomfortable and it was extremely unpleasant. I tried drinking alcohol after taking a pill, and it caused me to have a really bad hangover, even after consuming only a very small amount of alcohol. I stopped taking the pills almost immediately.

Working at Groq

Once I started at Groq, I immediately felt like it was important to make technical contributions in order to prove that I deserved to be there. I had joined the compiler team, which was a software team, and in my role on the DLA team at Intel PSG I had been responsible for writing RTL for the FPGA, which was a significantly different style of coding than writing software. However, I felt confident that I was good at writing software and I wanted to prove it. In addition, I noticed that the others who had left Intel PSG for Groq earlier were each given responsibility for important parts of the code, and were being treated like they were going to be promoted to be managers. It seemed like they had a better relationship with my manager, and I strongly suspected that they were having conversations and not including me. I became worried that I would be treated like an outsider, and I felt like I had to prove that I had technical skills so that my position at the company would be safe and I would not be at risk of being laid off.

We decided that I would work on trying to find performance optimizations in the code in general. I wanted to find places in the code where it was possible to make an optimization that would cause a large improvement in performance that could be measured, so that I could prove that I had technical skills. I made a few small changes that were reasonably good, before I found a place in the code where it seemed like I could improve performance significantly. Someone else on the team had written the initial version of some code that generated hardware instructions for one of the blocks on the chip. I noticed that the code that they wrote was hard-coded to handle a few specific neural network graph patterns well, however it would produce very unoptimized code in a lot of other cases. I realized that I could rewrite the code and replace it with a generic algorithm that would handle any situation and would run much faster. I quickly did this, and then showed the team when I was done. Unfortunately, while I believe that I did demonstrate that I had technical skills, this was also code that someone else had been assigned ownership of and had been intending to improve themselves. I felt bad about it.

In addition to this, the person that I knew from Newfoundland at Intel PSG, who I was concerned was going to be laid off due to the comment that I had made, ended up not getting laid off. I wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that I had told the former Intel PSG manager that I was concerned about it when I was chatting with them in the DLA video chat. It seemed possible that he might have contacted the managers who still worked at Intel PSG and told them that I was concerned about it, which is why I mentioned it earlier in this description, though I really have no idea. I was not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing, if this is what occurred.