… This is the first in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today.
I don’t have a computer science degree. I don’t have any degree. I don’t even have a Leaving Cert. And if you’d met the career advisor who told me to walk out of school a few months before the exams, you’d understand that this was never about choosing an unconventional path. I got nudged off the conventional one and had to figure it out from there.
I want to tell this story because I think it matters. The tech industry is full of people whose paths didn’t follow the script. Most of us spent years not realising what we were actually capable of.
Between Two Countries
I grew up moving back and forth between Ireland and the UK. My parents moved for work, which meant I was always the new kid, always arriving with the wrong accent. In Ireland I sounded English. In England I sounded Irish. This was the tail end of the Troubles, so it went beyond playground stuff. There was a real edge to it.
One side effect of all the moving: I never had to learn Irish. Instead, they’d send me to the library while the rest of the class had Irish lessons. They probably meant it as a holding pen. For me it was a candy store. I read everything I could get my hands on. Looking back, it was probably a form of escape, but it built a habit of figuring things out by reading about them that would carry me further than any curriculum ever did.
School itself never clicked. Most of it felt like going through motions. The exceptions were maths and science, and only because those teachers found ways to make it interesting. The rest I just… didn’t engage with.
“Better Off Not Knowing”
In 6th year we all had the career guidance meeting. The one where someone is supposed to help you figure out what comes next. Mine was short. The advisor looked at my record and told me I’d be better off leaving school than sitting the Leaving Cert. His logic: not knowing my scores was better than failing.
I was seventeen. I took his advice. I left a few months before the exams.
My mother was furious. My parents had divorced by then and I was living with her. I don’t think she was angry at me exactly. More at the situation. At the waste of it. She was right to be.
FAS and the Coin Flip
With no qualification and no plan, I was sent to FAS, Ireland’s national training authority at the time. They assessed me and put me forward for two interviews.
The first was a trades skills course. Woodworking, metalworking, general hands-on stuff with the chance of work experience. The placement was in Darndale. If you want a sense of what Darndale was like in the late ’80s, watch The Commitments and then dial it back only slightly.
The second was a computer science course. Programming, PC technologies, work experience in the field. I’d owned a ZX Spectrum since I was about fifteen. I’d taught myself BASIC, poked briefly around in machine code, spent hours making the thing do things it probably shouldn’t have been able to do. This was the one I wanted.
But the interviews ran in order, and the first course accepted me before the second one could. I ended up in the trades programme. The people were friendly, I made some decent furniture (one of which got stolen) and I tried to make the best of it.
Thirty Minutes
A few months in, they had me sit an aptitude test. The kind that’s supposed to take two hours.
I finished it in under thirty minutes. The examiner was visibly stressed, kept asking if I was sure I was done, if I’d checked my answers. I had.
The next day I got called in. They told me my results were too high for the course I was on. That I shouldn’t be there. They wanted to get me into work experience as quickly as possible and asked what I was interested in.
Computers, I said.
The Pager on the Desk
My first work experience interview was at Motorola. The interviewer was brilliant. We talked about pager technology, programming languages, what the day-to-day would look like. He had a pager on the desk and let me examine it while we talked. I was fascinated. This was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be doing.
Then he asked where my FAS placement was. I told him Darndale.
He said he’d never heard of it. Excused himself to go ask someone.
When he came back, something had changed. He reached across the desk, took the pager out of my hands, gathered up the other pagers that had been sitting out, and put them all in his desk drawer. Then he started explaining how actually, this job might be a bit too advanced for me.
I was still a kid. I didn’t fully understand what had just happened. It was only later that I pieced it together. He’d gone and asked someone about Darndale, and that was enough. The conversation was over before it ended.
I didn’t get the placement.
What I Took From It
I’d love to say I was angry. That I used it as fuel, that it lit some fire. The truth is I was just confused. I didn’t have the context yet to understand that people would judge you on where you came from before they’d judge you on what you could do. That lesson would keep repeating itself for years.
But something else happened in that period that mattered more. The aptitude test, the Motorola interview, even the trades course. They started to form a pattern I wouldn’t fully recognise until much later. The systems that were supposed to sort people kept putting me in the wrong box. And every time they tested what was actually in the box, the results didn’t match the label.
I didn’t know what to do with that yet. But the next door was about to open, and this time it would be the right one.
This is the first in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today, from leaving school at seventeen to designing agentic AI architectures. Next: how a small computer training company, a data entry job, and a hand-traced map of Ireland set the foundation for everything that followed.