While the University of Maine was extending BITNET to families of long-time employees, I was writing AppleScript programs for Mac OS 7 at just 7 years old. By the time I was 8, I had compiled applications that ran when you double clicked on them, and magic happened that I was able to program into the machine. I would press the Record button, then remove the printer, then re-add the printer, and the AppleScript editor would autocomplete the code that I needed to execute on the machine to replicate the task. My first program was compiled in 1996 — 30 years ago this year — built using the scaffolded results of those instructions, which later developed into a natural ability of writing AppleScripts from nothing.
Hold onto that word: scaffolded. It's going to matter in about three thousand words.
I was born in 1988 in Romania and when I turned 7 days old, I was institutionalized by Ceaușescu due to Decree 770. I spent 843 days in one of his facilities until I was adopted on December 28th, 1990, and flown to the United States to live in the town next to the University of Maine Orono campus. My adoptive mother was Cynthia Mary Trimm, and she retired recently after 45 years of service at the University, working in the Career Center. Dating back to my earliest memory in this country, I remember the University deeply. I have memories of walking from building to building, helping mom move computers.
As the Technology Specialist at the Career Center, Cindy worked with the newest technology being brought onto campus, including BITNET — the first wave of the internet released toward the average citizen in the United States. Before the internet was a thing, publicly, for the good people of Maine, I had a connection into the internet since its inception. Growing up, I got to watch my mother sit in front of the FileMaker Pro server she controlled and created backups on. I watched her write HTML and read JavaScript textbooks and build counters. Decades later, after working with WB Games, I built counter in Go and made it open source, after seeing how counters were utilized in Helix Core — the Perforce product managing hundreds of terabytes of assets across a dozen AAA game studios.
The apple didn't fall far from the tree. It just changed languages.
Write Us the Software, Then We'll Demote You
I watched my mother spend hours debugging her code. I also witnessed her pushing back against others on campus who wanted to displace her from being the Technology Specialist for the Career Center. Their argument to her was, essentially: write us the software and then we'll demote you — because once it's written, what use is there for you?
She fought that. And she had something I do not have: a union.
Remember that, because in 2026 the same argument is being run against every engineer alive. Write us the software. Train the model. Feed the scaffold. And once it's written — what use is there for you? Except this time there's no union, no grievance process, and increasingly no human being on the other side of the table at all.
Well, decades later, I've learned first hand that it's people like my mother and I who push through the bugs and deliver the results that nobody else could. That was my calling. So I thought, and so I believed, because of how I grew up watching technology get used — and watching who it got used against.
The Boy Calling Himself Michael
Fast forward past the boy in the waiting room — a story for another day — and I enter high school as a huge nerd. I barely had three friends that I was close with, and they never lasted. I was a depressed imposter calling himself Michael. Nobody wanted to be best friends with me. I spent many hours in the computer laboratory and hung out with Mr. Wason, the computer teacher. He was friendly with my older sister, a football cheerleader, and he'd let me stay in the lab after classes so I could hack away.
Because I was an ESL Romanian-born kid living in Maine, I was battling an imposed identity while everybody called me Michael. You see, in Romania, I spoke less than ten words — but I knew my name. I was two. Overnight, on December 29th, 1990, I became Michael. I knew on the inside that I was Andrei, but I also believed in my heart that I wasn't worthy of calling myself Andrei — that because I was institutionalized in Ceaușescu's orphanages, I wasn't allowed. Every adult in my life gaslit me on my name from the day I arrived in America, and zero people explained to me why I couldn't be Andrei here. They used Andrei Michael until they switched it to Michael Andrei, and then it just became Michael — and Andrei was reserved for special occasions, when we wanted to have difficult conversations about my birth family and Romania.
I didn't respond to Michael at first. So I was trained to.
That's relevant to a programming blog, I promise. Because a name is not a label. A name is a program. We'll get there.
LAMP Stacks, MuggleNet, and 8th in the Nation
I loved spending my days reading technology books, and by the time I had the internet and access to php.net, I was teaching myself to build LAMP-based web apps. I took the tutorials I was reading and put them into action. In 2004–2005 I volunteered with MuggleNet and built an international news translation service — connecting fans to news about the franchise from around the world, in their native language, written by fellow fans from their own countries. Romanian was never part of it. Sit with that one for a second. I did.
I used those self-acquired skills to build online games, fan fiction CRUD apps, and to help manage a massive distributed MySQL database holding all of their data — on the number one fan site in the entire franchise, at multi-million visit scale, as the whole thing was unfolding in real time.
Then I won the Gold Medal at the 2005 SkillsUSA Maine vocational competition and got selected for Nationals in Missouri. I represented Maine with a classmate named Steve, and we built a website in hours before a panel of judges. We were handed a Word document of boilerplate company text, a few photos, and a logo.
Every team modified the logo except for Steve and I. Because you cannot modify a client's logo. That's not a style preference — that's basic copyright. When the judges realized that 31 of 32 teams had broken that rule, they didn't disqualify 31 teams. They threw the criterion out entirely and awarded us 8th in the Nation. The modified versions looked better than mine — I'll give them that — but they violated the spirit of the law, and doing it right cost me first place, because enforcing the rule correctly would have embarrassed everybody else in the room. My hands to God — I am telling the truth as I experienced it in 2005.
Keep the shape of that story in your head too: the people who followed the spec got re-ranked by a rules change after the fact, because the system found it easier to move the goalposts than to reward the ones who did it right. My mother had a union when that move was tried on her. I had a scoring sheet.
I flew back to Maine, 8th in the Nation, and still hungry.
Fifteen Years at Sawmill, a Coup at Wentworth
I joined Sawmill Publishing, a small magazine publisher in Bangor, ME, as a Web Design Intern while finishing my junior year of high school. By graduation I'd extended that internship into part-time employment that ended up lasting 15 years, until the company shut down shortly after the pandemic and the owner developed cancer. It started with a basic HTML and CSS website — very similar to the pages my mother maintained for the University. But I'd just come back from Nationals having won something, and I'd just made a splash at MuggleNet, so I walked up to Walter, the publisher, and proposed that the magazine could go digital — and that I would build it. We collaborated for years until that vision wasn't just realized but fully expressed, before the pandemic ended it abruptly.
It was the combination of MuggleNet, SkillsUSA, and Sawmill that got me into Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston as a Computer Engineering student. I joined campus and immediately went to join the IEEE Student Branch — which was run by two seniors who didn't want to let freshmen in. So I went to the Dean, demanded an election, and won — 64 to 2. The existing members voted for themselves; the incoming class voted unanimously for me. I staged a coup in the IEEE Student Branch at Wentworth, and I'll do it again. I stayed President until resigning my junior year to start at Cisco Systems.
In college I took mostly electrical engineering courses — intense mathematics, very little programming. Syntax and languages lived across the fence in computer science, and it was very much an over-the-fence relationship between hardware and software. I was naturally gifted at programming, having been writing it for ten years by the time I was a sophomore, so I became a teaching assistant and taught night classes alongside Professor Johnson — HTML, CSS, and PHP for design students and architecture majors. In all honesty, the CS kids were probably orders ahead of me in raw technique. But none of them had the communication skill to generalize the gift to the masses — to make anybody understand what programming is and how it affects your life. I did.
People ask why I didn't go into computer science. Here's the answer it took me until the AI era to say cleanly:
I learned to program from scaffolded code. The machine generated the instructions. I studied them, edited them, and grew until I didn't need the scaffold anymore. The interesting part was never the syntax — it was the system around it. That's engineering. And thirty years later, the entire industry is being dragged back to my starting point: agentic tools generate the scaffold, and the humans who thrive are the ones who can engineer the systems around it. Artificial intelligence didn't make the software engineer's plight obsolete for me — it made everybody else start where I started in 1996, standing at the Record button, watching the editor autocomplete.
That is why I did not go into computer science.
A Name Is a Program
You see, connecting this back to programming: a name carries a lot of weight. If I call the Large Language Model that is my life by my name, but my name gets changed on me — am I running another program? I argue yes. When I called myself Michael, I identified as an imposter trying to get by, trying to survive. When I reclaimed my name 7 years ago and said enough is enough, I gave my authentic true self the chance to emerge. I needed to deny the identity imposed onto me so I could realize the identity that Ceaușescu tried to erase under Decree 770.
When I joined Wentworth, I was calling myself Michael. When I joined Cisco, I was Michael. When I joined Oracle, I was Michael.
Nobody in college knew any of this. No professors. No classmates. Nobody who voted for me. I carried it alone.
Mohammed
December 2018. Oracle holiday party. My wife pregnant with our first child. Me — completely triggered if anybody said Andrei in any capacity, because using my own name felt like the ultimate act of selfishness against the adoptive family that saved me from Romania, and against the abandonment from my birth mother that I carried. And I'm standing there talking with a colleague:
Mohammed: What's your name?
Me: Michael. What's yours?
Mohammed: Mohammed.
Me: Where are you from, Mohammed?
Mohammed: Pakistan. Where are you from?
Me: Romania.
Mohammed: Michael doesn't sound Romanian.
Me: When I arrived in America, my name was changed to Michael.
Mohammed: Why?
Me: I don't know...
Mohammed: What is your real name?
Me: Andrei.
Mohammed: That sounds Romanian. Hi Andrei. Nice to meet you.
Why do you not use the name Andrei?
That conversation hit me like a ton of bricks. A stranger from Pakistan needed sixty seconds to see what an entire industry of AI-powered hiring software still cannot parse in 2026: a name got overwritten, and the original program was still running underneath it the whole time.
I went home that night wanting to get as far from Oracle as possible. I opened a bottle of whisky and had more than my fair share. By 11 PM I was drunk in front of the fireplace, alone, asking God to help me stop drinking. And I heard what can only be described as a voice from within: you'll never be the father that I know you to be so long as you keep calling yourself Michael. You are Andrei. It is time that you returned to me. I had just finished asking Jesus to help me stop drinking — and His answer was to change my name? Was I drunk? Probably. Was it real? Definitely.
When I restored my name at Oracle, I was asked if I was transgender. When I clarified that I was asserting my birth name from my adoption — that my identity confusion was never about gender or anything physical, but about the fact that on December 27th, 1990, I was Andrei in Romania and on December 28th, 1990, I was Michael in America — the response treated my restoration as if I were mocking trans people. I terminated my employment over it. My name is not a costume and it's not a statement about anybody else. It's the thing that was taken from a two-year-old who couldn't fight back, reclaimed by the adult he became.
Michael Was Big Tech. Andrei Is Gaming.
So in 2019, before the pandemic, I stopped calling myself Michael, started calling myself Andrei, and changed industries too — out of Big Tech, into gaming. Bit Fry Games, then WB Games. I have six published titles on MobyGames.
And I'll be honest in a way this industry rarely is: I do not like working in the gaming industry at all. I choose not to contribute my skills to it any longer.
But look at what my career looks like to a pattern matcher now:
Michael Trimm = IEEE, Cisco, Oracle. Big Tech industry expert.
Andrei Merlescu = Bit Fry, WB Games, SurgePays. FinTech and Gaming industry.
Two clean clusters. Two career trajectories. Two "people."
One expert.
One me.
Project Apario: What I Did Instead of Nothing
You see, when I said enough is enough and stopped calling myself Michael, I shifted realities and the world followed with me. In 2020, instead of taking my decade of Cisco and Oracle experience and doing nothing during the pandemic, I decided to do something. President Kennedy asked me — growing up, through history class videos — Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. Those words stuck. So I chose to contribute Project Apario to the American people, as thanks for saving me from communism in Romania.
I built the writer database first, followed the next year by the reader webapp. Over 17 days on a Zoom call with DJ Nicke — a former Disney animator, not a programmer — I wrote the first draft in Rails while being watched for over ten hours per day. I built the application singlehandedly, then deployed it by custom-building the DevSecOps pipeline with Ansible, Bash, and VMware, across 12 bare metal servers, serving 500+ concurrent connections every minute, for weeks, until the funding was cut. The project ended in 2024 and is now open source.
Then I took that $7,000-per-month Rails app and rewrote it as an appliance monolith in Go, dropping OPEX to $33 per month. That's the 99.5% savings. It didn't make me rich — it nearly bankrupted me. What it made me is provable. Every claim in this paragraph has a repository, a README, and a receipt.
2026: The Machines Doing the Hiring
Now the present. I have been applying for work for months. I am fed up with LinkedIn and AI interviews and being filtered out.
To this day, automated recruiting systems send opportunities to michaeltrimm@gmail.com while ignoring andreimerlescu@gmail.com. Same person. Same hands that wrote all of it. The software has decided the Big Tech expert is worth recruiting and the gaming engineer is not — and it cannot conceive that they are one human being who restored his birth name. The most important act of my life — undoing what Decree 770 and a well-meaning but wrong adoption decision did to my identity — reads to a machine as a data integrity error. An inconsistency. A flag.
Call it whatever you want. From where I sit, I'm being pattern-matched out of my own career, and the pattern it can't match is me. I feel like an underrepresented person in the most literal sense possible: the systems doing the representing have me down as two people, and they're rejecting both.
Here's how current this is. This week I applied to a junior Go developer role posted through micro1, an AI hiring platform. Before any human saw anything, I was required to join a recorded call — up to 50 minutes — with an AI, for a technical screening. I have 55+ open source Go projects. I rewrote a $7K/month production SaaS into a $33/month Go binary. Spare me the screening — frankly speaking. That's the tone of this whole piece, in case anyone was wondering: not rage. Frankness.
And when the response to an accommodation request is the AI doesn't recognize that, it's policy, no exceptions — I need companies to understand what they're saying out loud. The ADA covers the application process, not just the job. "The software is buggy" is not an exemption anybody wrote into law. The software is buggy af — and bugs don't excuse a company from EEOC and ADA obligations to the humans on the other side of the webcam. If I have to invoke the ADA and fight this, I will. I try to be nice about it. I've learned that nice and silent are not the same thing.
I was also triggered recently by DomainTools' Alex making a snarky comment — "I don't even know if you can write code" — as a means to force a CoderPad challenge in 2026. Ninety minutes of interviewing, and not three seconds spent on my GitHub, before or during. That is out of touch with reality — and I use those exact words deliberately, the same ones from my viral LinkedIn posts about HR teams trusting "top applicant" labels that are AI hallucinations. Because reconnecting hiring to reality — to shipped work, public repositories, production systems actually running in the world — is the entire fix. It's sitting right there. It costs three seconds.
Did Alex know that my half-brother in Romania is also named Alex? That he's younger than me, and that we've spoken? Alex didn't know any of this. He was too busy trying to determine whether I could write code to look at the evidence that I do. It was going to go his way or no way — and I don't work with companies that call that a team player.
IBM Warned Us in the 1970s
IBM put a warning in a training deck back in the 1970s, and it reads like prophecy now: a computer can never be held accountable — therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
Fifty years later, in 2026, we hand the most consequential management decision there is — who gets to work — to software. The "top applicants" it surfaces are pattern-matched hallucinations, the HR teams trusting it don't know the technology like I do, and the engineers with actual receipts get silence. It's going to hurt this industry in the long run, and I'm telling you that as somebody who has been on both sides of the scaffold for thirty years.
My mother built the tools and they tried to demote her for it. She had a union. I built the tools, trained on the scaffolds, published the code, gave a search engine to the American people for free — and the entity now deciding my employability can't be grieved, can't be appealed, can't be asked a single follow-up question, and cannot tell that Michael and Andrei are the same man.
So my professional story starts in Romania, and I turn the page each day that passes. I've spent my whole life putting hardship aside to build. I restored my name 7 years ago so my authentic self could finally stand up — and I am not going to let a pattern matcher quietly put Michael back on my badge because two names in one lifetime doesn't fit its schema.
I learned to code from scaffolded output when I was seven years old. The scaffold was supposed to be the starting point. I refuse to let it become the judge.
It's wild that 30 years later I am being filtered out by the very scaffolded output that started my career in the first place.
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