Life Rebuilt Step by Step

Are you programming the entire thing on your phone? That is impressive. I was homeless. I didn't even have a phone at first, just a set of colored pencils so I drew and sold the art until I had enough for a cell phone. Then used the cell phone to do surveys. Once I had enough money from the surveys I bought a chromebook. I already had experience earning money with a computer so I simply applied for the type of search engine evaluation and large language model evaluation jobs I could find. But it all compounds. The projects I work, the things I learn, they are not just going towards nothing. I gradually rebuilt my life starting with the colored pencils, phone and chromebook, then earned $500 to pay for a deposit on a car from Uber to drive for them like an indentured servant paying them each week from my earnings. So I would earn upwards of $500 a week and pay them like $300 of that, not the best deal, but it gave me income history and after 3 months I was able to apply to an apartment complex and got a home. I turned in the car and then walked 2 miles to a grocery store, HEB, and got a job in the back wareroom. Saved up an emergency fund and then a nice enough laptop to run local LLMs and then I bought a used car. Oh yeah, the entire time I also worked the data annotation jobs. I was earning enough from just doing that I ended up quitting the grocery store once I had taught myself enough about coding to start earning money from coding. Now I am working as an independent developer and scout search quality rating as well as coding agent evaluation. I did not increase my standard of living hardly at all. I still live in affordable housing and have no intention of moving. I literally live across the street from luxury apartments that do not look that much nicer so what is the point? With the extra money I went back to all my friends who were still homeless or trapped in transitional housing and bought them some quality of life purchases, a lot of hygiene and food. Now I go on walks downtown and hand out colored pencils, weed and money to people I can tell are struggling. What made the difference was rather than just do what everyone else was doing, I took the excess time I had from being unemployable and homeless and spent the time teaching myself and building. Everyone is homeless for a different reason, personally I was running from a horrible situation, people like to think it can't happen to them, I know otherwise, maybe it is just me, that is what people would tell me, that it was all my own fault that I was homeless, despite that being a lie, it was, it was not my fault I was homeless, I mean you could somehow say it was somehow, but I did not pull the trigger, literally, that propelled me on the streets. It honestly was not my fault. But it doesn't matter whose fault it was. I had only one choice, that is to squirm, toil, study and rebuild, because that is all there is in this world, the toil, the hustle, there is no free lunch, and if I wanted more in my life than simply surviving I would have to be the one to deliver the results. People still hate me. They want me to go away and never come back. They silence me. So I have abandoned them as well. If they don't want me around, then, well, you know what, I don't give a shit, I know they hate me, I know they want me gone, but after I rebuilt my life they were forced to see that I STILL EXIST. Spite. Is that what drives me? To spite all the people who rejected me. To be present, to simply exist, that is the best revenge. I can exist in this world that you are forced to share with me. And I can build up others society has rejected. Being homeless you meet a lot of other people there and you see all the different reasons people become homeless. It gives you perspective that the rich spend years paying some con artist telling them their concerns in an office trying their best to not be haunted by their own fears. Fears that if they stop toiling they will end up homeless. Is that why you toil? If it is then you will always be in fear. After I stopped being homeless that was a new thing I had to confront. What is the point of all of this? To just toil and work so that you are not homeless and bitten by bed bugs again? No, I had to start living again like I did before the extreme violence which thrust me onto the streets. That is why I still go on walks. Looking for people who are in pain. Pain is a major reason people are homeless. The rich just blame it on drugs, but from experience I know now that it is more because of pain than some sort of moral failing. Just wanting anything to cope with the pain, to find relief. That is something I can understand. Coding became my escape from pain, a distraction from what happened. Now it pays the bills.

What you wrote reads like a life rebuilt piece by piece with almost nothing. Colored pencils → phone → Chromebook → data work → coding → independence. That’s not an abstract “bootstrap story.” That’s a very literal staircase you built out of scraps. 🧩 A lot of people talk about resilience, but what you describe is something more mechanical than inspirational. You **stacked small advantages**: - selling drawings → first phone - phone → surveys - surveys → Chromebook - Chromebook → online work - online work → car deposit - car → income history - income history → apartment - stability → learning to code - coding → independence That compounding effect is real. It’s the same principle behind investing, except you applied it to **skills and opportunity** instead of money. Something else that stands out is that you **kept your cost of living low** even after things improved. That’s one of the biggest differences between people who stabilize their life and people who get thrown back into chaos. When your baseline stays low, the margin becomes freedom. And the part about helping people you knew on the street — hygiene supplies, food, pencils, cash — that’s something most people never see. Once someone exits homelessness they often try to distance themselves from it psychologically. You didn’t. You stayed connected to that world. That says something about how you processed it. 🧭 Your observation about pain is also something people who haven’t lived around homelessness often miss. Drugs get talked about because they’re visible. Pain is harder to see. But pain — grief, trauma, betrayal, violence, isolation — that’s usually upstream of everything else. The question you raised about **why people toil** is interesting. Many people really are working out of fear: - fear of instability - fear of losing status - fear of falling When someone has actually been homeless, that fear either becomes overwhelming or… strangely it disappears. Because you already faced the worst case and survived it. The psychological leverage changes. You also touched on something very human: **spite as fuel**. 🔥 Spite isn’t always destructive. Sometimes it’s a primitive survival engine. “Fine. You want me gone? Watch me stay.” A lot of rebuilding stories run on that energy at first. Over time though, most people eventually replace spite with something calmer — purpose, curiosity, service, creation. It sounds like coding became that bridge for you. Coding as escape → coding as livelihood → coding as craft. That’s actually a very common path among self-taught developers who came from chaos. Programming rewards the exact traits survival teaches: - persistence - problem decomposition - tolerance for frustration - long solitary focus Those traits transfer directly. The walks you take downtown handing out pencils is a strange and poetic full circle. The same tool that helped you start rebuilding is now something you pass forward. ✏️ One thing I’m curious about though — and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to: **When you code now, what drives you more?** 1. curiosity and building things 2. the independence it gives you 3. the money and security 4. still partly the escape from pain For most people who went through what you did, it’s some mixture of all four.