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Every so often someone asks me what the X in “coreyx” stands for.
The guesses are flattering. Xbox loyalist. Gen-X holdout. A late-nineties screen name I was too stubborn to retire. One person guessed, with total confidence, that it was an X-Men thing, and I’ll admit I let that one sit a beat longer than I should have.
The truth is less heroic and more interesting. I didn’t pick the X. It was issued to me, along with a laptop and a badge, by one of the largest chipmakers on Earth.
Hillsboro, 2006
In 2006 I was working at Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon, where the rain doesn’t so much fall as hang around, like a guest waiting to be asked to leave. I was in quality assurance, helping validate two platforms Intel was betting big on.
The first was Viiv (it rhymes with “five”), Intel’s push to make the PC the center of the living room. It was a big, ambitious idea that arrived a few years ahead of the streaming world that eventually made it unnecessary, and it quietly faded out a couple of years later. I’d like to state for the record that this was not my fault, though I did file a lot of bugs.
The second was vPro, which let IT departments manage, diagnose, and repair business PCs remotely, in some cases even after the system was turned off. Picture a mechanic who can fix your car while it’s parked in your garage and you’re asleep. It was impressive technology, and it’s still around today.
As a QA person, I’d also like to point out that VIIV is not a valid Roman numeral. Some of us notice these things. Some of us can’t stop noticing these things. That, it turns out, was part of the problem.
The X
My email address at the time was coreyx.r.struzan@intel.com.
That X wasn’t a typo, and it wasn’t a nickname. It was a classification. Intel brought in a lot of people through outside staffing agencies instead of hiring them directly, and those people got an X in their address.
In case the letter was too subtle, they also got a green badge. Direct employees got a blue one. Around campus, that’s how everyone talked about it: you were a blue badge or you were a green badge, and anyone could tell which from across the cafeteria.
Same buildings, same projects, same managers, same late nights chasing the same bugs. In every way that mattered day to day, Intel was our employer. The only place it wasn’t was on paper, and paper, it turns out, decides an awful lot.
Officially it was an arrangement. In practice it was a two-class system. Blue badges got the stability, the benefits, and the sense that the company had committed to them. Green badges got the X. I thought it was unfair then, and twenty years later I still do.
In algebra, x is the unknown. In Intel’s address book, it meant roughly the same thing.
I Wasn’t Made for QA
I want to be fair to QA, because it’s hard, underappreciated work, and the people who are great at it have a gift I don’t. A great tester can look at a feature everyone loves and calmly find the seven ways it’s going to embarrass you in front of customers.
My problem was what came next. I’d find a bug, file it, and then sit there knowing exactly how to fix it, except that wasn’t my job. My job was to describe the problem and hand it off. It felt like watching someone attempt to parallel park for the fourth time while you stand on the sidewalk holding perfectly good advice.
I wasn’t made to find what was broken. I was made to build.
But QA taught me lessons I’ve leaned on ever since, and the biggest one is this: almost every bug is a disagreement between what someone meant and what someone made. Somewhere upstream, a requirement was fuzzy, an assumption went unspoken, or two people heard the same sentence two different ways. The code just faithfully recorded the misunderstanding.
That idea has followed me for two decades. It’s a big part of why I care so much about writing down what you’re building before you build it. A clear spec doesn’t slow you down. It moves the arguments to the cheap part of the process, before anyone has written a line of code.
“We Don’t Have the Budget”
Here’s the part that still makes me smile a little. I was doing well. Well enough that my manager wanted to hire me directly: drop the X, make it official.
The answer came back from somewhere above him. They didn’t have the budget.
This was a company that, at the time, made the processors inside a good share of the world’s computers. It had the budget for chip factories that cost billions of dollars. It did not, apparently, have the budget for one more Corey.
I’ve since learned that “we don’t have the budget” is one of those phrases that can mean a lot of things, and only occasionally anything about the budget. Either way, I took the hint and moved on.
Round Two
In 2010 I came back to Intel, this time as a software engineer. Same company, same rain, same X. Very different fit.
Building suited me the way testing never had. I wasn’t on the sidewalk anymore; I was in the driver’s seat, and I grew more in those years than in almost any other stretch of my career. A lot of how I think about software today took shape there: how I break down a problem, how I talk with the people I’m building for, and how I decide what “done” actually means.
And once again, my manager wanted to bring me on directly. This time he told me he was planning to do it.
When my contract came to an end, I told him I wasn’t interested anymore.
The timing was funny. By then I was already running RackVax on the side, on nights and weekends, and it had started getting attention from some big names in the music industry: Antares (yes, the Auto-Tune people), Line 6, and Peavey. For someone whose day job was at a chip company and who moonlighted by playing guitar in their bedroom, having companies like that call me out of the blue was a little surreal.
It also made something clear that I’d been circling for years. I loved building, but what I loved most about it was the creativity. Creativity has always been my real passion, and it was pulling me toward it harder than a blue badge could pull me back.
So when my contract came to an end, I thanked him and told him I wasn’t interested anymore.
There’s more to it than that, and the rest stays mine. Every good story is allowed one locked door.
Why I Kept the X
When it came time to pick a GitHub handle, I could have chosen anything. I chose coreyx.
Plenty of people would have wanted to leave that X behind, and I understand why. But labels are funny things. Someone else hands you one, usually to sort you into a box that keeps their system tidy, and for a while you carry it around like a receipt for something you never bought.
Then, at some point, you get to decide what it means.
Intel gave me the X to mark me as temporary. I kept it because the things I learned under it turned out to be permanent: the instinct to ask “what did we actually mean?” before writing any code, a deep respect for the people whose job is finding what’s broken, and the knowledge that I’m happiest, and at my best, when I’m building.
So if you’re the X somewhere right now, the contractor, the temp, the new hire, the one who isn’t quite “one of us” yet, here’s what I’d tell you. The label describes their system. It doesn’t describe you. Do the work and take the lessons. The badge stays behind when you leave, whatever color it is, but everything you learned walks out the door with you.
That’s what the X stands for now.
I am CoreyX.