There’s a tidy version of this story where I’m a customer-service guy who got curious about computers. The real version starts with a bonus I lost because I couldn’t type fast enough.
I was eighteen, maybe nineteen, taking technical support calls for a phone company — English and Spanish, back to back, out of Nicaragua. Close to a hundred calls a day. The floor ran on one number: AHT, average handle time. Three minutes a call. And every call had to end with a note in the system — what the customer wanted, what you did, how it resolved.
Here’s the trap: I was a slow typer. Genuinely slow. So every call handed me the same impossible choice — keep it under three minutes, or leave a clean note. I couldn’t do both. And every so often QA pulled your calls, read your notes, and docked your scorecard for anything missing. One month that math caught up with me and I lost a bonus over it — a real, juicy one, gone because I hadn’t left notes on enough calls. That’s the moment the rest of this comes from.
So I learned to code in Notepad
I’d always been into computers, so the thought that showed up was obvious and ridiculous: what if something else wrote the notes? Problem was I had no idea how to build it, and no tools to build it with. The job gave me exactly two windows — a browser where the support system lived, and Notepad for drafting notes. That was the whole development environment.
So that’s where I learned. Between calls I read whatever JavaScript I could find. I wrote it in Notepad — no editor, no autocomplete, no help — saved the file, opened it in Internet Explorer, watched it not work, and went back to Notepad to guess at why. Debugging in Notepad, one call at a time. Grinding at its finest, lol.
A form you filled with clicks
A few weeks of that and I had a prototype: an HTML file — JavaScript, a little CSS — that I opened in Internet Explorer like it was a website. It was a form. You filled it with clicks instead of keystrokes — the call reason, the steps you’d walked the customer through, the outcome — and it assembled a clean, standardized note. One more button copied it to the clipboard so I could paste it straight into the system.
Never again would I lose a bonus to my typing speed.
But the part I didn’t see coming: the notes it produced were good. So I kept pushing. I sat down with the QA scorecard — the exact rubric they audited us against — and calibrated the form to it, field by field, default by default. At that point it wasn’t just saving me typing; it was a cheatsheet that scored 100 on every call, and the note came free with it.
I never released it. I told a couple of people where the file lived — just a path on a shared drive. But someone would see a coworker’s perfect notes, ask how, get pointed to the folder, and that’s how it spread: person to person across the floor, off a shared drive nobody ever announced. The thank-you messages from peers and the bit of recognition from my managers did something to me. I’d built a thing people actually used. That was the moment software engineering stopped being a hobby and quietly became the plan.
Why Victor Stein
The name on my headset was never mine. My real name is a little hard to pronounce for an English speaker, and on a three-minute call that friction is expensive — you’re burning rapport in the first ten seconds while someone tries to repeat it back to you. So I gave myself a better one. I wanted something Latino but easy to say, and something that actually meant something to me.
On break and between calls, I read — and one of the few books I kept coming back to was Frankenstein. Everyone remembers the monster; the man who builds it is Victor Frankenstein, the creator. I took his first name, and the “stein” off his last, and that was it. Victor Stein. The creator, not the monster — which, looking back, is a weirdly accurate name for someone who’d just figured out he liked building things.
Nothing started over
So when people frame call-center-to-engineer as starting over, I push back. Nothing started over. The English I sharpened on those calls, the rapport you learn to build in three minutes flat, the muscle for delivering bad news without losing the person on the other end — that isn’t the chapter before engineering. It’s half of what makes a senior engineer worth having in the room. And the other half I also got there: I wrote my first real program on that floor, in Notepad, to solve a problem that was costing me money.
I lead a team now. I still build a small tool the second a process annoys me — tawtui is the same instinct, more than a decade later. And I still go by Victor Stein. The job that gave me the name is the same one that gave me the work.