Peter Lewis
How I got into computers — from a borrowed Macintosh to directing software engineering.
1984 age 0
I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina.
My mother stayed home with me through my early years, until I started school at five. A strong, independent woman who has always loved to serve the Lord.
Terry Lewis (Father), Pam Lewis (Mother)
1988 age 4
Apple · Atari
My father brought an original Macintosh home for work — the first computer I ever used.
Flight Simulator on that Macintosh. The first video game I remember.
Asteroids on the family Atari 2600. My first console game.
Dialled into a local BBS. My first time online, over a modem and a phone line.
Dad was a software engineer himself. He paved the way for my interest in computers and software, and made sure I had a strong ethical foundation.
Terry Lewis (Father)
1989 age 5
Nintendo
A NES under the tree on Christmas morning — the first console that was mine.
Top Gun for the NES, the first console game I owned.
Then Mario Bros and both its sequels, Bubble Bobble, and The Legend of Zelda.
1990 age 6
Nintendo
A Game Boy in March.
Tetris and Mario, everywhere I went.
1992 age 8
Moved to Spring Branch, Texas, in August. My mother had taken a job in the San Antonio area. I was eight.
Pam Lewis (Mother)
1993 age 9
Nintendo
Super Nintendo, Christmas morning.
Super Mario World, Pilot Wings, Donkey Kong, and NBA Jam TE.
A 286 — the first computer that belonged to me. Dad and I built it together.
SimCity, Populous and Commander Keen on it.
1994 age 10
Moved up to a 386, built with Dad again.
Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom and Doom II.
Terry Lewis (Father)
1995 age 11
A Datalogic 486.
SimCity 2000, and Command & Conquer — Red Alert not long after.
1996 age 12
Sega · Nintendo · Intel
A Sega Game Gear in June.
Nintendo 64, Christmas morning.
Super Mario 64, Pilot Wings 64, Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye, Donkey Kong 64.
An IBM Pentium, 75 MHz.
First camera: a Kodak Advantix 3700ix.
1997 age 13
AMD
First job. Summers of 1997 and 1998 working for my grandfather's lawn care business — 15 to 20 yards a day, most of it behind a weed eater and a backpack blower.
Hard-earned money. It taught me what my own work was worth, and settled one question early: I did not want to work outside for the rest of my life.
Wrote my first website, for fun. Peters Wonderful Website! is still up on the Internet Archive, hit counter and all — hosted on GVTC's subscriber web space, three years before they hired me.
Built a computer myself for the first time, around an AMD K6. Dad watched and stepped in when I needed him. Everything after this one I put together.
Installed Slackware, my first Linux.
Gary Lewis (Grandfather), Terry Lewis (Father)
1998 age 14
Nintendo · Intel
Game Boy Color, Christmas.
Pokemon.
An Intel Celeron 300A.
Learned ASP, the first language I actually programmed in. Everything before this had been HTML, and Dad was there whenever I couldn't work out why something wasn't doing what I expected.
1999 age 15
Sega · AMD
Sega Dreamcast, Christmas.
Sonic and Crazy Taxi.
An AMD Athlon.
Quake III Arena, Half-Life, Age of Empires II, SimCity 3000, GTA II.
2000 age 16
First job in computers: a summer internship on the GVTC help desk, still in high school.
Once they learned I could program, they had me writing software instead of working tickets.
Wrote my first real application that summer: a Visual Basic 6 program that read call logs off the phone system over a serial connection, flagged every 911 dial, and printed a daily report to a network laser printer for GVTC's government audits.
Founded Sticky's Computers with Kenny Scholwinski, a friend from high school — custom-built machines and small networks for families and businesses on the north side of San Antonio, with an online storefront for parts orders.
Stood up my first home server. Game server, file server, and a sandbox for Active Directory and Exchange, licensed legitimately through a TechNet subscription.
Keith Mitchell (Manager, GVTC), Kenny Scholwinski (Co-founder)
2001 age 17
Nintendo · Xbox · AMD
Game Boy Advance that summer.
Won an Xbox in October from a Taco Bell promotion — a month before it reached stores.
Halo and Unreal Championship on it.
An AMD Athlon XP.
Built the online DSL availability checker for GVTC's ISP.
Broadband — GVTC DSL, thirteen years after that first dial-up connection.
2002 age 18
Graduated high school in May.
First contract work that summer, for GVTC's long-distance division — a custom reporting tool for leased-line rate reporting.
Got my ham radio licence. I have held it ever since.
Sticky's Computers wound down. My co-founder and I went separate ways after high school and never restarted it.
A Compaq iPaq Pocket PC, my first smart device.
2003 age 19
AMD
Hired for the summer to upgrade the offices and stores at Joshua Management and the Parham Group to Windows XP. Construction and real-estate development, specialising in self-storage. It wasn't meant to be permanent — I was going to school.
Two days in, Mike and Ann offered to pay for my college if I stayed and studied in the San Antonio area.
It grew from help desk work into running their servers, standing up new ones, administering Exchange and the accounting packages, and building their web presence — eventually the systems for close to 100 people across two states. Seven years, and my first full-time job in computing.
An AMD Athlon 64.
SimCity 4, and more hours in it than anything else I have played. Rise of Nations and Empire Earth alongside it.
My mother stepped back from her career to care for my brother, who has epilepsy, and to homeschool him. She showed me what it means to love through self-sacrifice.
Pam Lewis (Mother), Mike Parham (Owner, the Parham Group), Ann Parham (Owner, the Parham Group)
2004 age 20
Nintendo
Nintendo DS, Christmas.
2005 age 21
Xbox
Met Christie, who would become my wife.
Became youth leader at my church, and stayed in it until around 2010.
Started running the church website. I have run the website for every church I have belonged to since.
Half-Life 2, and Battlefield — 1942 first, then Vietnam.
Set up a branch office in Florida.
Built a custom CD carrying JavaScript project-estimation tooling. A marketing piece: make the complexity of a build plain, and the case for hiring a real estate developer with it.
Xbox 360 on launch day, 22 November.
Halo 2, Marble Blast Ultra, Fable.
A Samsung A7. There was another camera somewhere around 2000 that I have no memory of.
Christie Lewis (Wife)
2006 age 22
Intel
Stopped going to college. The credential I've never missed — the network and the experiences it would have given me are the real cost.
An Intel Core 2 Duo.
An HTC TyTN, sold as the AT&T 8525. My first smartphone: a slide-out keyboard and Windows Mobile.
2007 age 23
Nintendo
Nintendo Wii, Christmas.
Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, New Super Mario Bros.
Married Christie in October.
Designed a customer analytics tool that mapped self-storage customers visually. Mike used it to test his theories about traffic patterns when scouting sites for future development.
Disney World on the honeymoon. The first of countless trips there.
Christie Lewis (Wife), Mike Parham (Owner, the Parham Group)
2008 age 24
Apple
Moved to New Braunfels in January, into the first house Christie and I built and bought.
iPhone 3G on 11 July, launch day.
Started building an online streaming platform for video lessons — before YouTube. An e-commerce store took the payment, then issued an authorization ticket that unlocked playback through a Wowza media server.
Very difficult. I had to learn every piece of it in order to build it.
Christie Lewis (Wife)
2009 age 25
Intel
An Intel Core i7.
2010 age 26
Joined Harland Clarke as a programmer analyst — my first full-time programming job.
A Canon 60D — the first camera I took seriously.
The Bahamas.
Christie Lewis (Wife), Bob Andreasen (My manager, 2010–2014), Terry Lewis (Father)
2011 age 27
Apple
An Apple MacBook Pro.
Kerbal Space Program.
Started an iPad app with Bob in December, for taking and fulfilling orders at in-person events and seminars.
2012 age 28
Apple · Intel
Wrote the iPad app with Bob through 2012.
The hard part was distribution: an Apple Enterprise-signed build has to reach the people who need it without ever going near the public App Store.
Built the XML-to-PDF rendering engine behind our Adobe InDesign scripting, running through 2012 and into 2013.
An Intel Core i7-3770K.
Alaska.
Christie Lewis (Wife), Bob Andreasen (Built it with me)
2013 age 29
Xbox
Xbox One on launch day, 22 November — eight years to the day after the 360.
Halo, again.
Battlefield 4.
2014 age 30
Built the Adobe Illustrator scripting system that streamlined onboarding new stationery designs, working closely with the graphic artist dedicated to them. An extremely difficult project.
That taught me the thing I still build by: software has to get out of the user's way. If it isn't making their actual work easier, it isn't worth much.
Hawaii.
Christie Lewis (Wife)
2015 age 31
Moved back to Spring Branch in January, to be closer to church and into a better neighbourhood.
The awards had stacked up on the desk by now — Pillar of Excellence in 2012 for customer focus, Rock Star in 2015.
Christie Lewis (Wife)
2016 age 32
Built the PCI-compliant payment gateway — where I learned to appreciate regulated systems and the weight of the requirements around them.
Factorio.
2017 age 33
Nintendo
Nintendo Switch on launch day, 3 March.
Breath of the Wild.
2018 age 34
Overhauled the iPad app and the payment processing gateway.
Built the distribution system that finally answered 2012, six years on: AWS Lambda and Vue, handling upload and secure delivery of the Enterprise-signed build through an app store of our own.
Mexico and the western Caribbean.
Christie Lewis (Wife)
2019 age 35
AMD
Joined GLG on 1 July, on Dennis O'Brien's team.
Six months later I moved to the conference system team, working for Ted Patrick — someone I'd met at Harland Clarke.
My code went beyond small user bases and backend systems into large-scale, public customer-facing systems and landing pages.
At the tail end of the year we started the WebRTC implementation.
A Ryzen 3900X in August.
Ted Patrick (Conference systems), Dennis O'Brien (Engineering leadership, GLG)
2020 age 36
COVID. We went from a telephone-only conference provider to IP-based, and spent the whole year driving the WebRTC implementation hard enough to get ahead of it.
The hard part was parity. It had to work identically across both of our telephony providers — indistinguishable no matter which one was carrying the call.
Technically the most immense thing I've worked on, and the most rewarding.
Started running the livestream at my church, and ran it until we moved in 2021.
2021 age 37
Xbox · Apple
Xbox Series X in February.
An Apple MacBook Air — the M1.
Promoted to Principal Software Engineer in the spring.
Left in August to follow Ted to Card.com.
Moved to Ronda, North Carolina, in August, to be near family who had come back here in 2019 — the state I was born in, thirty-seven years later.
A Canon R6, still the one I use.
Yellowstone.
Christie Lewis (Wife)
2022 age 38
Card.com shut down engineering nine months after I arrived.
Dennis hired me back to GLG.
Dennis O'Brien (Brought me back to GLG)
2023 age 39
Overhauled and built the monorepo that holds our core conference system tools.
Super Mario Bros Wonder on the Switch.
2024 age 40
Dennis was let go, and I took over the team as its director.
Satisfactory.
Elected as a deacon at my church.
2025 age 41
Nintendo
Nintendo Switch 2 on launch day, 5 June.
Pulled together the proof of concept for an invisible compliance auditor, live streaming over Zoom RTMS.
Ordained as a deacon in March.
2026 age 42
What I'm working toward is what it has always been: keep learning. Engineering is changing completely in the age of AI, and adapting is the whole job now — otherwise you get left behind.
Astrophotography, when the sky cooperates — my own lenses, and my father's Celestron when he will lend it.
Alaska again, in June.
Christie Lewis (Wife)