Opinion When I started coding for a living 43 years ago, I didn’t know shit from Shinola. I’d written a lot of BASIC, some Z80 assembler, and knew my way around floppy drives and a disk operating system. I knew nothing at all about how to operate as a junior engineer in a professional environment.
I lucked out. My two “seniors” on that first job out of university – John and Ethan – took me under their respective wings. John knew everything about bit-banging the 8085 CPUs we programmed; Ethan had more systems experience – he could make CP/M sing with BIOS calls. I needed the experience of both, and they shared it freely.
A good mentor knows when to take the training wheels off the bike
In the two years I had that job, I made a fair few mistakes but learned the essentials of software engineering as a profession. Those lessons kept me in good stead, and well fed, for another decade.
Across that decade, I learned how to be a competent coder and – at best – a lackluster manager of junior engineers. Not natively blessed with the sort of patience it takes to deeply mentor and nurture talent, I did the best I knew how.
Today I recognize that I could have done far better.
I had a need to, because as the co-creator of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), in 1994 I became mentor to an entire community of 3D-on-the-web enthusiasts, working to bring coherence to an effort that could have quickly sputtered out.
Owen Rowley mentored me in how to do that.
Owen had a storied past in Silicon Valley – possibly cutting the world’s first mousepad while working at an arts supply store in Palo Alto, before going to work for his hero, Nolan Bushnell. From there, Owen became one of the sysadmins at Hewlett-Packard, setting up all the configuration – both internal and external – for HP.com. Owen told me tales about updating HP’s hosts file by hand every week to accommodate a growing internet, this being before Paul Vixie graced and vexed us all with DNS.
When I met Owen, he was sysadmin for Autodesk’s Cyberspace Development Group, which at the time was the center of the action for commercial VR. Older than me and far wiser, he gave me a continuous string of “clues” about how to operate in an environment of individuals with big brains and bigger egos.
“You’ve got to make people feel wanted. Lay out the welcome mat. Make it easy for them to contribute – and be recognized for their contributions,” he advised.
After three decades of open source, these feel like common knowledge. But in the early ’90s, they were not widely recognized as virtues. I listened, and went from being a reluctant mentor to an enthusiast: connecting, listening, teaching, promoting, and cultivating because anything that helped anyone working with VRML would help VRML – so why not help?
“We’re a community,” Owen would say. “And we’ve got to act that way.”
Community also meant safety. Owen didn’t tolerate bullies. I learned from his example, privately cautioning and occasionally ejecting people from the VRML mailing list who took their frustrations out on others. That sort of thing helps. Visible actions that say “We’re here for you and we care for you” demonstrate a commitment to a safe space for people to share. (A bit of knowledge we’d do well to recover in the era of always-angry social media.)
VR had its moment in the Sun, fading away before the turn of the millennium. Owen and I both went on to other things, but I could always turn to him for advice, as a sounding board for ideas, and for his unique insight in how to operate effectively – and humanely – in the world. He finished his career as a sysadmin for banking giant Fidelity Investments, retiring just before the combination of cloud and virtualization largely eliminated his sort of role.
I learned so much from Owen in the 30-plus years I knew him. Most important of all, he taught me the patience to mentor. Case in point: I bought a used SPARCstation to code the very first version of VRML. I’d never used UNIX before, so Owen carefully showed me around. After the second panicked call to restore my OS from tape because I’d nuked my system with a poorly placed rm -rf *, I recall him looking me straight in the eye and telling me: “This is the last time I’m doing this for you.” A good mentor knows when to take the training wheels off the bike.
These days, I do a lot of mentoring. I can thank Owen for that. And for something else, something that he never said, but which he always demonstrated: for humans, mentoring is the job.
In memory of D. Owen Rowley (1947-2025). ®