AQ'S Corner

Technology didn’t arrive in my life as a trend.
It arrived as a presence.

I grew up watching machines hum, click, and glow. In the 1980s, technology was physical. You could hear it working. You could feel the weight of it. Nothing was instant, and nothing pretended to be effortless.

In the 1990s, as a teenager, I watched the internet take its first breath. Slowly. Publicly. Patiently. Pages loaded line by line. Connection wasn’t assumed. It was earned. Even then, there was a quiet sense that something irreversible had begun.

By the time I reached college, technology wasn’t culture yet. It wasn’t branding. It wasn’t identity.
It was infrastructure.
It was unfinished.
It was becoming.

Then I entered the industry, and it never stopped changing.

Over the last two decades, I’ve watched systems migrate and collapse. I’ve watched frameworks rise, fall, and quietly reappear under new names. I’ve watched security go from an afterthought to a necessity. I’ve watched convenience accelerate faster than care, and speed outpace responsibility.

I’ve watched technology shrink from rooms to desktops to pockets until it became something we carry everywhere and barely see at all.

What people don’t talk about enough is this: technology doesn’t just evolve. It forgets.

It forgets how long things took to build.
It forgets why safeguards exist.
It forgets the human cost of moving fast without thinking.

And it often forgets the people who remember the before.

I’ve been out of college for twenty-four years. I’ve spent twenty of those years working in technology.

That gap isn’t a weakness. It’s context.

It means I’ve lived through eras, not just updates.
It means I recognize patterns before they trend.
It means I don’t confuse novelty with progress.

Being two decades deep doesn’t mean resisting change. It means understanding it well enough to question it.

I don’t panic when tools shift.
I don’t chase every new platform.
I don’t perform relevance.

I measure impact.

I ask who benefits.
I ask who is exposed.
I ask what happens when systems scale faster than ethics.

When technology reshapes itself again, as it always does, I don’t flinch.

I’ve already seen this cycle before.

There’s a quiet ageism in the technology industry that suggests experience should be softened, minimized, or politely stepped around. That the future belongs only to those who just arrived.

But technology without memory is reckless.
Progress without perspective is fragile.

So I’m saying this clearly, without apology.

I am two decades deep in technology.

Not because time passed, but because I stayed present, stayed curious, and stayed accountable while the ground kept moving.

This month, I’m choosing to mark that.

Not with nostalgia.
Not with a résumé recap.
But with reflection, clarity, and forward motion.

I’ll be celebrating twenty years in tech all month long, sharing lessons, memories, and observations from inside an industry that is still evolving and still asking hard questions of all of us.

Two decades deep.
Still here.
Still building.
Still paying attention.

Whew.