Here are a few titles for this piece that didn’t make the cut:

• Set Phasers To Innovate
• Enterprise NCC-1701-B (for Bowdark)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Being Good at Serving Our Customers
• NetWeavermancer

If you’re already feeling nerd over-saturation, please stay. I promise this gets (slightly) better.

My name is Paul Modderman, and I’m the new Chief Nerd at Bowdark. If you wonder why someone would accept a title like “Chief Nerd”, consider the following completely true factoid: one of my senior pictures is me posing by a stack of sci-fi novels. If my mom cared to read tech blogs, she would comment her confirmation. If my dad cared to read them, he’d probably say “Oh yeah, I remember that. That sounds about right for Paul.” He wouldn’t comment, though. That’s not really his thing.

(Also, back then my stack included The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed, since they were sequels to the great Rendezvous with Rama. I thought they were good enough to make the cut. A later re-read cut them from my all-time-greats list. Don’t judge me! It’s OK for tastes to change!)

I love sci-fi so much. For me, the draw is its futureward gaze. In Star Trek, humanity overcomes its less civilized tendencies, discovers faster-than-light travel, and joins a galaxy teeming with other civilizations. In Foundation, a human (and also a robot) finds a way to apply math, science, psychology, and history to avert the complete collapse of galactic civilization. In those and so many other stories, future technology enables those radical shifts. Warp drives! Positronic brains! Transporters! Holodecks! COME ON! Who wouldn’t want to travel to the stars? Just stare off into the future and all that stuff is waiting.

(I know, I know, not every sci-fi story works out in that utopian way.)

Back on Earth in my non-warp-capable daily life, I spend a lot of time tinkering with software doodads. Languages, frameworks, cloud services — you name it. I poke at ways to make cool things with computers. I read tons of hacker news and tech blogs. When someone puts a new thing out into the world for others to see…I just can’t help myself. I have to try it.

Burning Things is Strongly Recommended for Proper Nerding

I do it because it feels like trying out the future. No, building a Flutter app is not the same thing as hitching a ride to Betelgeuse. But there’s this forward motion to computer tech, and I fully admit I get swept up in it. I want to touch the future.

It wrecks my sleep schedule. Because if I see a new shiny thing out there that I know can solve a problem (or that can let me goof off and make crazy graphics on SAPUI5 apps), I can’t sit still. My focus switch is flipped. I’m zoned in. My weirdo thing will work, or I will STAY UP ALL NIGHT TRYING. It doesn’t even have to seem cool to anyone else. I just need that dopamine hit of “Holy crap, I got it up and running!”

I know there are lots of people like me, losing sleep monkeying around with things and want to touch the future. And if there’s one thing that nerds love almost as much as getting their crazy things working, it’s being around other nerds. In that respect, I couldn’t ask for better company than Bowdark. We live at the intersection of lots of tech capabilities, and we play with projects every day that glue super cool tech together. My fellow Bowdorks are nerd laser beams just like me, and I’m proud and pumped to be joining them.

I want to bring sci-fi to enterprise tech. So in Switched On we’re going to dive deep on nerd, put futuristic tech into our Bat-utility-belts, and talk about successes (and yeah, failures) in our efforts. And then one day, in that incredible sci-fi future, you’ll be able to browse Switched On while you cruise to a galaxy far, far away.