Today, @XBOW works for some of the most demanding security teams in the world. But my first demanding customer was… my dad. He was a professor of Semitic languages, translating ancient texts and piecing together what people wrote thousands of years ago. He’d bought a personal computer for his work, but couldn’t use it to type his manuscripts. It didn't have the special symbols he needed for languages like Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hebrew. I set out to try to help him through code. Eventually, I wrote a word processor that let him type the symbols he needed and switched direction from right to left when he wrote in Hebrew. He loved it! I was excited to put my coding skills to good use, and he bought me a Pascal compiler for my 17th birthday to keep my passion going. It let me go beyond working in low-level code and made programming even more fun. It even had a special feature where you could code the body of a procedure directly in assembly. That helped me work on new projects and display non-ASCII characters on the screen. I went on to become a professor of computer science at Oxford, build GitHub Copilot, and now XBOW. But it all traces back to my first and most demanding customer: My dad and his ancient texts.