Blade Edge

Unwilling to move out of New Jersey because he’s just not the pick-up and move type (to this day), back in the late 90’s and the turn of the century/millennium his options were very, very limited. Not only was the industry itself still coming into its own, web resources were sparse and all the big companies were out on the West Coast. Some internship offers came from Boston and Georgia, and even one close-by in New York City, but none panned out. So it’s no surprise that his first programming experience didn’t come as a game developer, and neither did his first published writing experience.

In 1999, a junior in high school, he responded to an ad in his local paper about panelists being needed for the technology section. He was accepted on and at the first meeting the paper asked for volunteers to write an article on how their lives had been affected by technology. Having penned short stories before that had been published in school papers, Drew accepted the assignment and the article was printed a few weeks later. Unfortunately the panel was disbanded shortly thereafter.

In 2000, just as Drew was turning 18, he was offered a job at the start-up company his father had joined (taking leave of AT&T). The company, Napali Networks, was looking into multiplexing technology – joining together several DSL pipes to send data at higher bandwidth. Drew was part of the network programming team working on the tech. However the company did not stay afloat very long and 7 months later the doors were closed, but not before others had opened.

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