From the Start
the story so far...
My name is Brennan Letkeman. I was born in the winter of 1993 in a small prairie town called Medicine Hat, in western Canada.
Early Years
I went to public school and was one grade ahead because of my birth date.
I was raised evangelical protestant, the church was a big part of my community growing up.
I had the two best parents in the world, really.
In grade three the class had a field trip to my house because my dad was building a robot vehicle for the military and seeing the hydraulics move was the coolest thing ever.
Growing up I had a ton of Lego and How It Works books, which informed the rest of my life building and creating mechanical things.
Scholastic Book Fair was magic, I devoured books
We rode bikes to school in the warm seasons, I've loved bikes my whole life
Growing Up
In junior high I was introduced to Photoshop, which at that time was very basic.
In high school I was introduced to AutoCAD and later found Blender from the Gamemaker forums
I was one of those kids who didn't really study and finished his homework the morning of, because the nights before were spent doing Blender stuff, which felt infinitely more useful.
Somehow I accidentally graduated with first-class honours.
My friend and I won gold in Skills Canada for video editing, went to provincials to compete.
I had a paper route in the morning, a part-time job at Sears selling electronics and in the summers got my first more 'real' job doing web design with a local CMS startup / studio which I did for three years.
Moving On
in 2010 I moved to Calgary, Alberta to attend SAIT for mechanical design
Had a lot of fun, met great friends and colleagues who are still more core network today
Investigated deeply and eventually left Christianity
Started and wrote the Acrylo Design Blog for a few years, wrote a ton every single day
Graduated and was quickly hired designing police and emergency vehicle interior gear: the consoles and articulating arms and whatnot to mount laptops and siren controllers and guns etc.
Worked there for 3.75 years, eventually becoming bored and - in hindsight - pretty depressed
Lost the job, decided I wanted to freelance instead of looking for another desk to hold down
As of this writing, this is my fourth year freelancing and it's going great
The Future
It's taken me this long - honestly, shockingly recently - to realize that I'm allowed to just, like, want stuff?
I've never really wanted anything before, partly because the basics were all neatly provided for, and because I grew up knowing that "nothing could fill that happiness hole in all of our hearts" (besides Jesus, but I left him too) so I had just internalized a sort of nihilism about searching / finding anything.
Not wanting things is pretty zen, but having accomplished the lower Maslow things, I have discovered that without striving there's mostly just boredom and navel gazing which aren't super useful for either me nor the world / community around us.
So that's my next phase in life: find things to want, worth wanting, and then striving to get them.
Let's find harder problems and solve them together.
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