David Kabii — From the Village to Server Rooms and Boardrooms: From Coal to Diamond Part II

The Inception of Codeboss: Becoming of a Coder

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When I joined Alliance High School, I took 12 subjects, and of course as you can guess Computer Studies was one of them. Our teacher was one Mr. Mwangi who was also the patron of Karate Club that I initially joined. He was great at teaching and making everything properly understood. I would later learn what he was using was a combination of analogies and instilling in us critical and first principles thinking.

The becoming a Karateka move was one we carried out after coming from the first mid-term break. I did not last long however as swimming and computers became more and more what I focused on.

Initially, I was just trying out anything I could think of or came across, mostly from the internet by visit a cyber cafe in Kikuyu Town after I was done with the exercises in the KIE syllabus book. At 2/- per minute, it was damn expensive especially when it meant an hour browsing effectively took out a 1/20 to 1/10 of my pocket money, for the whole term. Combined after visit every single person I knew who would give me something. Yep, Kshs. 1000/1500 (approx. $10/$15) on reporting, Kshs. 500/1000 ($5/$10) after mid-term breaks.

I did not really mind for two reasons. One, I had just come from a primary board school where I was definitely among the poorest students. Their posh Nairobi accents, oxford sets, and Oxford dictionaries however were of little help when I still ranged them effortlessly in the primary school national exam, as per habit. At this point in life, I was doing and working on only that which interested me, relying most on talent and massive last minute effort to surpass others, and it was working.

Secondly, being in Alliance High School compared to the boarding school I was in was like walking in a cavern with an oasis after trekking the Sahara. While some, especially those who had been day scholars were still adjusting, I was running with it. Among the war stories we used to joke about with former primary schoolmates was the hunger we would experience. We adapted quickly, becoming extreme gatherers and hoarders.

During visit days, we had only the weekend to clear all food items. That meant there was a glut of food, and a lot people had the same things. With a group of friends we would do the rounds claiming we were not visited, but specifically targeting non-perishable goods. Things like chapatis fall under that category for those of you who do not know. You just dry it out in the sun and you got a last supper type of bread that is not going to go bad. It does start tasting more like chalk though with time. It would only later emerge the cateress had being selling off half of the rations and was fired. We finally had relief at the most crucial juncture of our lives, the year of the national examination.

Therefore being in a school where I was getting three proper balanced meals that resembled something from a medium class cafe or lower-middle restaurant buffet was the first game changer. Your boy had energy of tumbo to run like a Peugeot (People Eat Ugali Get Energy Of Tumbo).

Secondly, being a national high school, we had people who were being chauffeured in by cars with the national flags, the sons of who is who, as well as those from extremely challenging conditions that their pass marks were at times lower by as much as 100 marks. Misery truly doth loves company, I was content that now I was not among the poorest. Just a guy who had it a little tougher than others and doing better than some.

When the first test results came in, I was in for a rude shock. I was not only not in the top 10, I was not even in top 50!!! When you meet the best of the best, you have to adjust your strategy. It was clear talent and massive last minute effort would not cut it at this level. After some thinking my goal then became simple: keep towards the front and middle of the pack and never fall below the halfway mark at worst and consistent effort on those things I wished to pursue, among them computers.

The Start of Programming: Joining Computer Studies

Towards the end of my second year in high school, we started getting ready for whittling down the subjects to the ones each of us would be taking in the national examination. For me, the choice was simple enough: Computer Studies and History. Commerce was too easy and I hated cramming, which was necessary in Geography, the only other humanities subject I had any interest in.

I loved Power Mechanics but unfortunately the feeling was not mutual. It was a subject we were actively discouraged from taking unless one was exceptional at it. The first time we did technical drawing Mrs. Mwangi (no, not the computer teacher’s wife) told me, “Kijana (Young man), your drawings are beautifully ugly.” I had to agree she had a point. As for Geography, Mrs. Kihwaga straight up told me I should drop it when teachers were trying to convince students to remain and I was wholly in agreement. That was the shortest sign off of them all by the way.

By this time, our computer squad had swelled in ranks, and one of the people in our class came with a book on Pascal programming. The KIE book had the barest minimum on programming and I had already tried those out in the computer lab as all had Turbo Pascal installed.

At first, getting your hands on the book was not easy and we worked on a schedule. Within a week however, only about 15–20 were still reading it on the side, the others having decided to learn it when they were taking computer lessons. In a month, there were only about 7 of us consistently reading the book and challenging each other on programming. Soon, we were in the third year of high school and I was a computer studies student as I had always desired.

The Techpreneur Origins and Grey Hat Dabblings

At this point, my dream job was still to take to the skies as a pilot or an aeronautical engineer (technically getting others to the sky but still). Becoming a senior, and a senior computer students student, had some few perks that would prove invaluable to me.

First, we had got a key to the junior lab, and could use it anytime it was not being used. We used soap to create an impression one day and had our own key that we could use to enter the lab at night. I had come up with the idea as a joke and someone had followed through on it and let me in on it. My guess was that they needed someone good at coding. At that point, about 10 of us were “good coders”, according to the standards of the Form 3 computing clique. The others were either not interested in the scheme, likely to snitch, or already in with plans on what they would be working on. That left me, whom they knew would flirt with the dark edge.

Figuring it was a medium risk, high reward play, I agreed. After all, we would just be using the computers when no one else was. Since access to the key was controlled by the Computer Labs Captain, even if a prefect found you in the lab past bedtime they assumed you had permission to be up and left you alone. That worked until one week we got too cocky and went to the lab when he was on duty and it did not end well but I digress, will come back to this later.

Second, we could now access the Senior Library, where my favourite reads became the Fortune, Scientific American, National Geographic, and The Economist. It also had some outdated but still somewhat current information on things like batch and bash programming and Windows 95 administration, which I tried to run and figure out on Windows 98 and Windows 2000 (Yeah, that one).

One day a classmate came in with a book on Visual Basic programming (Deitel Visual Basic), the kind that had a diskette in the back for the software needed. I enquired where they got it but they were gatekeeping and informed me it was their book. They lent it to me just long enough to install the programs before demanding the book back, but I was on my way.

Third, we finally got the computers networked and internet installed. It was extremely slow, the kind where loading a site with an image gallery took about 10 minutes. There was no e-commerce or social sites at this moment, so you know what type of site I am talking about. I was not interested in that much however, as puberty was just about to wreck havoc on my hormonal balance, but had to yet.

What I was interested in however was quiet, space, and money, in that order. The lab was crowding and getting rowdy as more people came in who had no interest in computers whatsoever. Watching it something clicked: these were just the ones who knew about the late night computing sesssions and were brave enough to come to the lab. There was a market to be tapped.

The next Saturday in the afternoon I took off from school, wearing a T-shirt and shorts under my uniform shirt and trousers. We were supposed to wear shorts but had finangled a pass from the school’s nurse and matron to wear trousers, which I did gleefully. When we got to Form 4 and almost all everyone was in trousers like when we had visiting schools or on Sundays, that is when I wore shorts. The contrarian attitude was already there and growing, just not being utilized properly yet.

Once out of the school, I bought a paper bag into which the uniform went and was now just another teenager in the streets. I headed to Kirinyaga Road, somewhere you would stick out like a sore thumb even just passing through in a student’s uniform. I took all the money I had and bought two magazine, the kind with lurid stories and black and white except for four pages in the middle (2 sheafs, both sides), that were coloured. Each cost me 60/-, for a total of approximately $1.

I was broke, had done no market research beyond observation, and filled with nothing but hope and hunger. Mostly literally since by the time I got back to school all that stood between me and being destitute was 25/-, and we still had two months left in the term. I would then rent out the magazine for 20/- plus the cost of the magazine on condition of being returned in the same condition as it was given out in. Needless to say, each weekend I would be in Kirinyaga Road getting fresh copies.

With my business in swing, the computer lab quieten down again. The money was enough to now start living large. Weekends were spent in Kikuyu Town playing PS, eating chips, and of course the biggest spend was still cyber cafes on weekends when all the labs were crowded during the day.

CDs came out and that was a game changer. The first disc I ever burned was a live boot CD of Linux Mint. The first album I ever ripped was Eminem’s The Eminem Show (sorry Eminem, it was them breaks). Incidentally, the first album I ever owned was DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot cassette tape, a gift from a cousin who had grown tired of listening to it. The first album I ever bought was Nas’ Stillmatic, and still got it though it really can’t play now, it DJs itself due to scratches.

Several days after another book popped up again on programming, and this time it was a Basic book. Again, I did some follow up and was being blackwalled again. This time however, I had leverage. I let it be know that if he did not give me access to the book and tell me where the books were coming from, he and his whole clique were cut off from the black and white magazine supply. Anyone found to have given them access was cut off too. Took less a day for him to crumble, most due to pressure from his peers.

I learnt something I had not know until then: there was a Careers Library in school, which I knew in passing, that had current books on computing, which i didn’t. The old brochures and humanities reports and books were a front being used to gatekeep the latest technical information on all fields. These were books from old boys that were recent and being used in colleges and universities. They were coming from as far as MIT, Harvard, and Yale.

With that information, the next phase of my becoming a coder and dabbling in grey hat territory. However, the Careers Library was controlled by Form 4s, almost all prefects, and that was a clique I was not about to get into whatever I tried. It is also impossible to leverage someone with more power than you and whom you can’t figure out what motivates them. That meant I had to find another way into the Careers Library. It was time to turn frenemies into allies.

Third part dropping soon, watch this space.

Thank you for time and stay tuned!!!