What's the biggest example of the domino meme in my life? I'm gonna have to go with "I got bored on the sleepy overnight shift at the data center -> Russia invaded Ukraine".
Struggled to think of something that fit... most of the cause/effect stuff in my life has been pretty straightforward.
I think: AOL Chat Room -> owning a champion schipperke.
1. I got bored on the overnight shift and started volunteering for LiveJournal's support team.
2. I kept getting put in charge of more and more shit, because I got shit done
3. I got laid off from said overnight shift, and since it was the tail end of the dotcom burst, decided to try college again.
4. I told everyone I was going to have to pick up a job that would work around classes, probably waiting tables, so I was gonna have to stop volunteering.
5. Like three LJ employees went to Brad and said "I know you have no idea what she does, but if she stops doing it, bad shit will happen."
6. Brad hired me and told me to keep doing it.
7. I spent the next 2 years cheerfully doing like 7 jobs so Brad didn't have to deal with a lot of the things he hated.
8. This freed him up to work on interesting technical problems, including how to best support text in non-Western Latin encodings.
Even today with Unicode and UTF-8 it's a ridiculous problem. Too many things that are just rules that you cannot reason about because they describe systems that humans grew, not designed.
