uWink Was A Blast, and I Learned Code at 16. Take That Steve Jobs!

My mom Zahava met Nolan Bushnell at a Hollywood party when I was 15 in the 2000s. It was a special time for Nolan: money was in the air, games were free, and everyone loved Atari, which Nolan founded in 1972 as CEO.

My mom pitched Nolan on her genius inventor son, who knew how to code, and could juggle six jobs at once. He agreed to let me interview for an unpaid internship with uWink, his latest gaming and entertainment venture, under his son Brent Bushnell.

Brent was a polymath, a UCLA engineering grad, and a genius engineer who taught me valuable lessons in why you don't use Mac for gaming engines in restaurants. He also taught me about expensive cars, leadership as an alpha geek, and having fun with young people and mentorship.

I had a lot of fun at uWink. Three times a week for a year and a half, I would bus an hour-and-a-half from home to hang out and learn from uWinks engineers.

I learned to write Flash, which was similar to Javascript, and built game engines with physics. I read a lot of Adobe documentation. My favorite failure from uWink was writing 200 lines of code like an essay, and running it for the first time: Ouch!

I met Nolan only one time. He was CEO, and joked that he built 7 startups for his 7 children including Brent. As the honorary high school intern at uWink, i enjoyed learning, and discovered a passion for code, startups, and version control which lasted me a lifetime: github.com/joshagilend.

Thanks Brent!