Gareth Dwyer first heard the phrase, "behind every no-entry sign there is a door," a couple of decades ago, and he has been looking for a counterexample ever since. He hasn't found one yet. Gareth grew up with his three siblings in Grahamstown, South Africa. There wasn't much there except some highly respected schools and a small university. Gareth had heard that school was an unpleasant and largely pointless experience, so he opted to skip it and go to the university instead. The university door had a no-entry sign on the door because it only accepted people who had gone to school. Gareth ignored the sign. He studied piano for a while but soon, he wondered if there was more to life than sitting in front of a keyboard all day. So he switched from piano to computer science, and it took him a while to realize the irony. He studied philosophy too because it was here that people never told him to stop being so argumentative.
Gareth noticed the disparagement that his philosophy and computer science departments felt towards each other, and he found it strange. He soon discovered that he wasn't the first person to see that there was room for some common ground, and he went to Europe to study computational linguistics, where he found other people who liked debating the finer points of language while talking about the three hardest problems of computer science (naming things, and off-by-one errors).
In between doodling on blank paper while listening to very knowledgeable people lecture on content that was occasionally fascinating but often soporific, Gareth has gained so-called "industry" experience with companies such as Amazon Web Services in Cape Town and MWR InfoSecurity in Johannesburg. He has several years' experience in writing, and his favorite languages are English and Python.
He discovered that writing and writing a book are not fully overlapping experiences, and the former is hardly preparation for the latter. The pages that follow would not have come into existence without the combined efforts of many people.
