When you hear someone say they work as a software developer, you might imagine someone who was an excellent student and diligently studied IT at university, but some have led incredibly difficult lives. Gavin Ray, a software developer who became addicted to
◆Kicked out by parents and started living alone, but was arrested again.
Ray, who earned his high school diploma while in prison, began attending a two-year
◆I got a job after reading a newspaper article while in prison.
While in county jail, Ray happened to read a newspaper article about technology companies offering internship opportunities to underprivileged young people facing risks. Having spent his childhood in front of computers, teaching himself programming and creating modified versions of games, Ray had dreamed of becoming a game programmer since he was a child, so he cut out the article and kept it.
Afterward, 19-year-old Ray was transferred to a one-week job release program. This program allowed him to go out and work during the day if he could find a job within a week's grace period. Ray visited a company called Techtonic, which he had seen in a newspaper article, and explained his situation. Fortunately, Ray passed the interview and began working at Techtonic as a full-stack web developer intern.
Ray said, ‘I had absolutely no knowledge of web development, and to begin with, I wasn't particularly interested in it, but this job far exceeded my expectations. Because of my criminal record, I thought I would spend the rest of my life in construction or something similar.’ Later, the journalist who wrote the newspaper article that sparked the whole thing came to visit, and an article based on Ray's interview was also published.
Boulder tech academies swamped as they race to retrain workers – Boulder Daily Camera
◆Drug addiction and being fired, starting over from scratch
Ray met his current wife while working at Techtonic, but he relapsed into drug use. Furthermore, the manager at Techtonic disliked Ray and lied to the owner, claiming that Ray was hours late every day, which resulted in both Ray and his wife being fired.
Later, the discovery of Slack logs reportedly cleared Ray of the stigma of being late almost every day, but having lost his job, Ray's drug addiction worsened, and he was forced to move back in with his parents. However, the situation worsened because his father was also an addict. When his life at his parents' house fell apart, Ray and his wife ended up moving into a friend's spare room.
Having hit rock bottom with nothing but a change of clothes and a laptop, Ray asked himself, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ and decided he didn't want to live like that anymore and resolved to quit drugs. He started working washing dishes at a restaurant, and his wife also took a job delivering and installing large appliances in a warehouse with a friend, but they couldn't escape their difficult life.
Ultimately, his wife insisted that she would support the household for a while, allowing Ray to spend his time looking for an IT-related job. Convinced by this, Ray began a job search that lasted several months. He made it to the final interview stage many times and received job offers from eight companies, but all of them were rescinded by the HR departments, who stated that they did not hire people with criminal records. He felt as if a carrot had been snatched away from him.
Nevertheless, he managed to get a job at a startup in Miami with an annual salary of $50,000 (approximately 8 million yen), and they even covered his moving expenses and the cost of temporary accommodation through Airbnb. He also secured a promise of a significant raise after one year of employment, and Ray and his wife moved.
◆My encounter with Hasura and my career change
The systems at the company Ray joined were ‘outdated Rails applications with accumulated technical debt,’ and part of Ray's job was to rewrite these systems. In the process, Ray encountered
Ray's blog has also been featured on the social news site
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