My first tech job was working for a karaoke company in London. I was hired as a music production manager but was studying computer science in my spare time and

My first tech job was working for a karaoke company in London. I was hired as a music production manager but was studying computer science in my spare time and convinced my boss to let me revamp all of their tech. They were a tiny company and they appreciated the help I think. The boss was a lovely guy too who really encouraged me to run with it. The company was kind of lawless, no contracts etc. All very 'fly by the seat of your pants' . Also located in a pretty bleak industrial estate interestingly. They went from running their business off of an excel spreadsheet and rendering 4bit graphics for their videos to having an AWS-hosted HD video renderer, a streaming on-demand karaoke service, a brand new website /store and the ability to create ringtones on an industrial scale and upload them to iTunes. I didn't do the development of the actual software, I hired a few companies and individuals to do it and acted more like a product manager I guess. The thing about hacked Magento definitely rang some bells, what we managed to achieve through abusing that thing was a thing of wonder / horror. We did so much with the wrong tools and with very little investment. I did write some in-house tools and scripts too. A few were in Scala which is hilarious looking back as it's not really the sort of language your average non-software engineer coder is going to know. After I left, they basically left all of my tools unmaintained in the hope they would keep on working forever as none of the Magento types they had on their books knew about this. All in all it was an amazing experience to have this freedom. I could do what I wanted, I genuinely transformed the company by rewriting their internal tool chain, built new tech products for them and got to solve some quite interesting problems. These days I work on 'big tech', big corp stuff and I love it but I do miss the freedom.