How to Apply Childhood Passions in a Software Career

Erik Michielsen: How did your childhood experience tinkering with fish tanks and
electronics cultivate your understanding how websites work?

Marc Ferrentino: I did tinker a lot when I was a kid, tinkering with different –
whether was taking apart my dad’s VCR or stereo, or the
telephone, or basically whatever I get my hands on, or creating fish
feeder. I actually took a door part, cut a hole on it and actually
replaced with a little keypad unit and trying to get that to work.

That was fun stuff, that’s really interesting, kind of cool tinkering
type of things. And so, as I get older, it's like what's the version of
that, I could have gone into chip design or electronics, or other
things. But software, I like the most out of all the things I've did.
And I actually tried with my Electric Engineering degree was more
tinkering with the physical as suppose in software, where it's not.

I think what I like about software the best was that the barrier to
get something done to see your idea materialize with so much
lower than with a hardware or actual physical product.

And so, it was amazing, I mean you could literally sit there, a
person could have an idea and sit done. They didn’t need a lab or
they didn’t need a clean room and they didn’t need to send it of to
China to get a prototype and you can literally just come up with an
idea that can impact millions of people very quickly. And it really
just speaks with the vehicle at the internet that is, in general, for
change as a change agent. But yeah, it was something really cool
about that and it kind of gravitated towards that.