My first programming "real" job was at a technology incubator in Japan. I got hired on as a translator. At the time my Japanese skills were not exactly stunning, but technical translators do not exactly grow on trees in Gifu. (Try finding a bilingual Japanese/English CS major in Kansas. It is about that hard.)

Now, here's the rub: they had five translators locked into generous long-term contracts and they only needed really one-fifth of a technical translator, plus some utility translation for ceremonies and the like. So I went mostly unused. After spending far too much time on the Internet (shades of things to come) and getting acclimated to working there, I started trying to make myself some more work.

Example: we had a website with brief bios of ~200 companies at the incubator. This was static HTML written in DreamWeaver, and got updated once every year in Japanese and English. This was an absolutely mammoth undertaking, primarily because the data was first compiled into a Word document, then translated, then laboriously massaged into HTML in DreamWeaver. I thought "Wait, this is just string processing... and I have gawk." I did not, in fact, actually have gawk, but my university terminal account was still open, so I wrote some scripts and shaved two man-months off the schedule. The bosses were happy.

Later, after getting a little more political capital, I started getting the R&D group I was attached to to use me for their grunt work R&D. For example, I made GUIs which called their command line tools for robot vision work, begged off implementing fast fourier transforms in C ("I'm a Java programmer! Egads!"), did some grid computing and spam filters, and the like. My work product was atrocious. Demos I pronounced "done" functioned maybe one time in three. We didn't use source control, which is probably for the best, because if we had someone might be able to still see the code I wrote. However, my bosses chalked all of it up to "Hey, we get the budget for a translator whether we want it or not, might as well get some work out of him."

There were two projects of note in those three years. One was a massive translation of CAD training software manuals for a company affiliated with the incubator. It was 3,000 Powerpoint slides. I got it done right before any further mention of torque would have caused my internal springs to snap. The guy who requested it made it clear that he owed me one. When my contract expired, I sent him an email saying that I wanted to stay in the area a while longer and wondered if he could perhaps ask around to see if anyone needed an engineer. He called up a large company in Nagoya and informed the division chief, who owed him a favor, that there was a bilingual American engineer the company should hire. So they shook on it, and that was that. (We later had a job interview -- with my patron in the room and doing most of the talking -- which was mostly a formality. The line which sticks with me is "Oh, you're white. Not that there is anything wrong with that." Nobody had thought to tell my new bosses my name prior to the interview -- it wasn't really relevant to the transaction.)

The other significant project is a long story. It starts with an email from a teacher in the prefecture asking "Is there a good way to make bingo cards?"