This piece was inspired by this post by Aaron Boodman.
I remember myself as a calm, quiet kid, happiest when I had a bunch of wires in my hands. My parents used to give them to me as toys along with a screwdriver and an old cassette player I could take apart and try to put back together. I was three years old. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I loved the feeling of exploring the insides of a machine, trying to understand how it works.
In first grade, I was introduced to MS-DOS and Logo with a bit of PASCAL. Later, when the school got better computers, I started writing small programs in BASIC: tic-tac-toe, calculators, that sort of thing. It felt magical.
When I was 10, I finally got my own PC. At first, I mostly used it for games, but after I got internet access, everything changed. I discovered HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript. This was pre-HTML5, so the web was limited, but I still built a lot of weird and ugly websites. My computer science teacher actually liked them. I even made a bit of money by doing other people’s HTML homework, not just for my classmates, but for my brother’s too.
Around that time, I was really into GTA and discovered MTA and SAMP, community-made mods that added multiplayer to the game. I became obsessed with the idea of running my own server with custom mods and rules. That led me to PAWN, a scripting language used in those mods. I wanted to build a world where we could do almost anything, like in real life. A kind of proto-metaverse.
Eventually, I discovered Second Life — a fully virtual world with its own economy. It had everything I had wanted to build in GTA. I started creating things: clothes, buildings, scripts using LSL (a scripting language that’s a superset of Lua). I even made some money, converting Second Life currency into real-world cash.
But after a while, I realized I didn’t want to create only for a virtual world. I wanted to make something meaningful for people in real life. I was around 16 at the time, still unsure what that could be. What I did know was: I wanted to buy a new computer and a Korg microKORG to make electronic noises. So I launched a tiny “business” reselling ICQ numbers and other digital things on a local white-hat hacker forum. I earned enough to buy what I wanted… and nearly got expelled from school for truancy.
Around then, HTML5 launched, and the web suddenly became powerful again. I created my first homepage with animated JavaScript clouds in the header, layered and moving like in the real sky. I didn’t save the source code, but I still have a screenshot. Around that time I also discovered Bret Victor’s Inventing on Principle, a talk that shaped how I see programming and creativity.
In university, I studied Engineering in Innovation — a mix of semi-technical and business-oriented classes. My favorite courses were Engineering Graphics (lots of CAD), Computer Security (where I once “hacked” the university’s SMTP server — not because I was clever, but because it was ridiculously easy), and Philosophy, which taught me the value of asking right questions, and of creating a personal philosophy as well.
After graduation, I was lost. I didn’t know what I wanted. Luckily, a friend invited me to join a startup — MipoTheBot, a Slack bot for freelancers using platforms like Upwork. I worked on design, UI/UX, and started writing code again. That’s where my professional career began. We shut it down eventually, because we didn’t understand sales or marketing well enough. But I learned an important lesson: those things matter.
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