Building from zero after addiction, prison and a felony

Software engineer Gavin Ray has published a long account of rebuilding his life after addiction, prison and a felony conviction — and of the handful of people who took a chance on him. He wrote it, he says, after seeing Preston Thorpe speak publicly about his own background.

Addiction and prison at 14

Ray was a model student until middle school, when bullying and teenage frustration pushed him toward fights, drugs and rebellion. It began with an Adderall pill bought from a classmate; at 14, without a job or family money, he started selling prescription medication at school. He was soon arrested and charged with 17 counts of possession with intent to manufacture or distribute a Schedule II controlled substance.

He spent two years, from 14 to 16, in a maximum-security juvenile prison in Colorado, where he earned his GED. After release he briefly enrolled in community college while working as a landscaper for $8 an hour, but dropped out. Arrested again on drug charges, he spent 18 to 19 in county jail and became a convicted felon.

A newspaper clipping and a first job

Inside county jail he read a small newspaper item: "Tech company offers internships to at-risk & underprivileged youth". He cut it out and kept it. In the work-release program — inmates are let out to work by day and have one week to find a job — he walked into the company's offices on his first day out and explained his situation. They interviewed him and hired him as an intern full-stack web developer. At Techtonic, a contract development shop, he learned frontend, backend and DevOps with little mentorship, and met his future wife.

From zero in Florida

He later fell back into drug use and was fired after a manager lied about his attendance. He and his wife moved in with his biological father in Florida, who was also an addict; the situation collapsed. They were left with a few dollars, no vehicle and a single laptop — and that was when his sobriety began.

His wife delivered and installed appliances, riding a borrowed bicycle 30 minutes each way; he washed dishes until she told him to quit and spend his time job-hunting. He sent hundreds of applications and reached final rounds with eight companies, only for every offer to be rescinded because of corporate "no felons" policies. A small Miami startup finally hired him for $50,000 — he had driven four hours each way to the interview.

Hasura and the door that stayed open

While designing a V2 rewrite at that startup, Ray discovered Hasura, became active in its community and started sending pull requests. When Hasura offered him a job — slightly more than double his salary — the company was small enough that no background check was run. He later disclosed his felony to the founders, and they were fine with it. He has worked there, now PromptQL, since 2020.

He does not present the story as heroic. "Talent is not evenly distributed by background check," he writes, asking those who hire, mentor or review pull requests to remember that the person who looks risky on paper may be the one who spends years trying to become worthy of the chance.