It started in high school when I got curious about hacking. I installed Kali Linux, cracked my own Wi‑Fi, broke my own laptop, and even tried to take down Google on my first attempt. I failed, obviously. Before graduation, I learned C, then immediately quit because I had no idea what I was doing.

College was supposed to make sense of it all. It didn’t. My first year was nothing but physics, biology, calculus, and statistics — no programming in sight. In the second year, we finally got Java, SQL, C again, Perl, Python, data structures, project management — all taught so shallowly that none of us knew why we were even learning them. So I went rogue. I built my first Django project, and suddenly everything clicked. The internet became my real school, and from there I just kept building, joining online communities, and learning whatever seemed useful.

My first job threw me straight into TypeScript, a language I’d never heard of, plus Node.js. Somehow I made it work. Then I moved to a “short-term” contract job that lasted three years. It started with maintaining horrific legacy PHP code — no version control, no structure, just chaos. Eventually, I escaped to Node.js + TypeScript projects and unwillingly learned React and Next.js, which confirmed that frontend is… frontend. Which is another way of saying dogshit.

I graduated two years late and decided I wanted big‑corporate money. That meant learning the corpo stack: C#, Java, Golang, design patterns, microservices, DevOps, software architecture, scaling strategies, telemetry, containers, cloud patterns — you name it (big words, huh?). Now I can sit in a meeting with high‑level people and actually understand what they’re talking about. One more programming language learned: Corpo.

Today I’m an MT IT at the biggest bank in the country, cramming the entire banking business into my brain in three months while training and chasing banking certifications. I’m still not rich, but I’m definitely getting somewhere. Maybe.

And now, for some reason, I’m interested in COBOL, wireframe, and IBM Z. I mean — why the fuck are we still using this old‑ass tech to maintain the most critical programs in human history? I don’t know. But I want in. Because I’m where the money’s at.