I LIVED AT THE END OF TRAINING DAY
==================================

A Day in My Life, 1999

Published: April 6, 2025
Author: Daniel Conderman
Context: Memoir of working at the original Nitetime.net startup in Los Angeles
Original URL: https://conderman.group/2025/04/%f0%9f%9b%b9-i-lived-at-the-end-of-training-day-a-day-in-my-life-1999/


I lived right in South Central L.A.

And if someone ever asks where that is, I just tell 'em:

  "Did you see Training Day?"
  "Yeah?"
  "I lived at the end of the movie."

It wasn't as bad by then. 1999 in L.A. was this strange little peaceful glitch
in the matrix. The gang war had cooled off. The Rodney King riots were history.
And for a while, it felt like the city was exhaling.

I'd wake up early--before the traffic, before the city turned into itself--and
take my longboard out. That was my exercise. My reset. The streets were still
cracked from years of heat and tension, but you could ride. And I did. Just me,
the sound of wheels on pavement, and maybe the occasional "what up" from someone
sweeping their porch.

After that, I'd head back in, shower, grab whatever was left in the fridge, and
hop in the car with my wife. We were still young, still figuring it out, but we
had a rhythm. We'd commute into Koreatown, L.A. traffic doing its thing. Always
bumper to bumper. Always late. Always tense.

She'd drop me off at Nitetime.net, the startup I was pouring my soul into.

And man... it was a scene.

We had VPs with skateboards, marketing guys with frosted tips, and engineers
named servers after Pokemon. Mew was login, Charizard handled updates, and
unless you knew the internal naming scheme? You were screwed. I knew it. The
Perl guy knew it. Everyone else just hoped their pages didn't break.

My specialty was layout. Tables.

Not just using them--mastering them.

Back then, layout was tables. No DIV, no CSS grid. Just cells, colspans, spacer
GIFs, and raw brainpower. I could look at a Photoshop file and see the page
before it was built. I knew how to make it real--pixel by pixel--from scratch.

People thought I was a little crazy, probably because I was.

I drank free Red Bull by the case.

I worked 36-hour stretches for bribes like "go buy yourself some nice speakers
with the company card."

I debugged pages at 2am while someone's Pomeranian barked at me from the beanbag
pit.

And when 9:00 PM rolled around, my wife would come back, always pissed off.

Because it was late.

Because it was L.A.

Because I said "just one more hour" four hours ago.

But I had stocks to earn.

The dream was alive.

Or so we thought.


RECORD SCRATCH
--------------

The party ended fast. I remember the exact moment.

The investors came in.

They didn't want to see our roadmap.

They didn't want to hear about the new features.

They wanted a copy of the database--the only real asset we had left.

The CEO and president went to the DB guy. The same one who always wore
headphones, rarely talked, and definitely didn't joke around. And when they
asked him for it, he looked them dead in the eye and said:

  "That's not in my job description."

That was it. That was the moment I felt the air go out of the balloon.

He was drawing a line, and he was gonna hold it.

A week later:

  - The company folded.
  - The stock I bought with my own real money became worthless.
  - They fired the DB guy.
  - Then opened a new company in the same office with a new name and the same
    damn furniture.

They offered most of us jobs.

Because rich people don't like to lose.

They just reboot the game and pretend it's a fresh start.

Me? I took my cubicle speakers--the ones I worked a 36-hour shift to earn--and
I walked out with my head up. Because even if I didn't get rich, I built
something.

I lived through something.

I saw the rise and the fall--and I still remember what it felt like to code
through it all.