Tony Bytes

About

Tony

Hi, welcome to Tony Bytes — my corner of the internet for commentary on life, society, and the times.

I grew up playing Diablo II and writing fiction set in its world, hanging out in online guilds under various handles (Tempest was the most common — I even founded a guild called “The Legends of O’nyith,” now sadly lost to the internet or not!?). The writing habit petered out in the intervening decades, but the urge to put thoughts down never quite went away.

Offline, I’m a nearly middle-aged Italian guy named Tony, and I have the sterotrypical tendencies to back it up: I can spin pizza dough and make pasta from eggs and flour and am picky about red wines and espresso.

I have a lovely wife whom I met in college, and we have two cats.

The name Tony was supposedly given to immigrants coming through Ellis Island — short for “To NY.” At least that’s what I was told in grade school, and it’s the meme I force on people when introducing myself, so you’re welcome. In reality, it’s almost certainly not true.

Growing up

Nintendo 64 console with controller
Photo by Evan-Amos, public domain

I was a 90s kid and grew up playing video games on various game consoles - Twisted Metal on PlayStation, Sonic the Hedgehog on a Sega Genesis, Pokemon, Mario on a Nintendo, and my favorite ever console game: Phantasy Star Online on a Sega Dreamcast (RIP the best console ever) - the original online console game - dial up! Eventually I switched to computer games like Diablo II. That led me to writing. Like many my age, I loved Harry Potter, but I took it a bit further and started reading all sorts of fiction - Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, random short stories with wizards - and enjoyed writing in those settings, though I was never consistent enough to make it anything bigger than a hobby.

USS Connecticut nuclear submarine underway
U.S. Navy photo, public domain

My grandfather worked for Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory and was a huge nerd. He got me into science, showed me how to use a computer, what circuits were, got me interested in how the universe works. When I was very young he caught wind that I liked Back to the Future and brought me home a Flux Capacitor - it was actually just an antique light bulb he got from the lab, but it really got me excited about Physics. I wanted to travel back in time and see Dinosaurs, meet Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, zoom into the future and see what it would be like, if humanity went transhuman or great filtered themselves before that.

DeLorean DMC-12
Photo by TTTNIS, public domain

Actually, I broke that Flux Capacitor on a school bus while heading home one day and was convinced the time line was about to be destroyed. I think that’s when my parents explained it was just a light bulb. It’s ok, I still liked Physics.

Education

I went to college to study Math and Physics, wanting to become a theoretical physicist. I was a poor student though - while I met my wife there, I didn’t graduate. I had to start over at a community college, but did well and finished with a BS in Physics at a technical university.

Career

I switched to software engineering and got a job as a QA Analyst at a small local company, then moved to a startup that was building a PaaS before that was really a thing - pre Docker, pre Kubernetes. I went from SDET to Jr Scala Dev there.

Eventually I landed at a large media company, first on an infrastructure team helping set up and promote websites across environments, and later on an ops team helping govern cloud infrastructure. I’ve become very proficient with AWS, writing CLIs and serverless apps in Python, and have been sucked into the LLM coding harness revolution that’s ongoing.

The rest

I learned later in life that I had ADHD, and once medicated for it, it’s had a profound impact on me. Before, I would get excited about something but never finish anything. Now I’ve made steady progress on learning post-graduate level physics and math, piano, writing, building a consulting business on the side, working out with olympic lifts, and various other hobbies.

I’m a big nerd at heart. I love science, I love to debate, I love that moment when something just clicks into place and suddenly makes sense.

I love comedy, and while I’m a little comedic myself in person, I’m no standup comic or talk show host, but I do respect them a lot.

People who’ve shaped how I think

Disclosure

For details on how AI is used in making this site, see the disclosure on AI usage.