Ask HN: How good of a developer were you in your 20s?

If you count a super Star Trek game, chess program and operating system mods then I was a pretty good developer in my teens. Throw in a version of Conway’s game of life, simulating Dectape on ibm magtapes and actually doing computational research. But then, every hacker worth their salt did a lot of these things back then. When there’s only big iron, you had to be social enough to get along and good enough to get attention.

More seriously, the biggest question I have looking back is what I expect many have: was I correct remaining a big fish in a small pond or should I have gone general, moved to Mass or California and help extend Unix. Hacking was the key. No management and no concern for big bucks, just enough to keep doing what I wanted to do.

On the whole, it worked out ok.