In the early 1990s, there was a contest called “Apples for the Students.” Kids would collect receipts from a local grocery store and if those receipts totaled a certain dollar amount, the store would donate a new Macintosh to their school. Back then, buying such a computer cost nearly $2,000, and where I lived, most schools — or parents — couldn’t afford that.

Well, the contest was a success. A dozen or so machines were donated to my high school’s “computer lab,” and three went to the student newspaper. It was on those computers that I learned how to write a news story, how to scan and crop photos and how to design a newspaper’s layout. Working on those computers in journalism class also helped me to land my first internship, then a job at a local newspaper. And that experience led to other jobs reporting at local newspapers in Florida, Mississippi and California.

It would be nearly a decade before my best friend Amy and I were able to join forces to buy my very first home computer, an iMac G3 blue. I wrote the first issue of Inscriptions Magazine on it as well as dozens of stories and poems. It was a real workhorse.

My next desktop was a gray Power Mac G4. Then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs was all about making the company’s computers more futuristic-looking and this one certainly fit the bill. By the time I obtained it, my career had advanced to the point where I was working in the media at the national level.

A few years later, I was able to afford my first laptop, an iBook G3 gray clamshell. I worked on it so much and for so long that the lettering on the keyboard disappeared. Eventually I was able to upgrade to a silver MacBook Pro laptop — the 17-inch model because I was doing a lot of layout and photo work (and because my eyesight was starting to weaken as I aged).

In the 2010s, I received a 13-inch MacBook Pro for Christmas that I mostly used while traveling, though I continued to bang away on the larger laptop at home for my day-to-day work until it finally died. Next, I bought an iMac desktop with a 27-inch screen, which I still use to this day. His name is MacDubh. Although he’s starting to struggle in “old” age, he recently helped me land a new job.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be working as a contract overnight editor at… Apple News (via PRO Unlimited). For the next year, I’ll be curating local news stories in 14 different markets. Which means when you wake up in the morning and open the Apple News app on your phone, you’ll probably read stories that I suggested.

From a computer contest to a contracting gig in 30 years — that’s what I call going full circle.