Long before computers entered the picture, my sky was full of something else entirely: space. Not the casual, everyone-says-this-once kind of interest, but the real kind, rockets, orbits, the idea of leaving the atmosphere behind entirely and looking back down at everything I knew from somewhere far above it. For years, if you asked me what I wanted to be, the answer came without hesitation: an astronaut.
That ambition shifted a little as I got older, staying pointed at the same sky but landing on something more grounded and, to a child's mind, more achievable. Somewhere along the way, astronaut turned into pilot. It made sense in the straightforward logic of a kid figuring out the path to a dream one step at a time, an astronaut felt distant and abstract, something that happened to other people in other countries, while a pilot was a real job, one you could actually picture yourself doing, and it still kept me close to the sky I'd been staring at for years.
That plan held steady until sixth grade, on one of those ordinary school days that somehow ends up rewriting everything. The teacher went around the classroom asking each of us the same question every child eventually gets asked: what do you want to be when you grow up. The answers rolled in predictably, doctor, engineer, teacher, pilot, mine included, nothing that hadn't been said in that room a hundred times before by a hundred other kids. Then it got to a classmate, someone whose name doesn't need to be part of this story, and he said something none of us had heard before: software engineer.
I sat with that phrase the rest of the day, turning it over, not understanding it, and not being able to let it go either. I wasn't the sharpest kid in class, just quietly above average, the sort of student who listens more than he speaks, but that unfamiliarity itself was the hook. Everyone around me had heard of doctors and engineers and pilots their whole lives. Nobody had ever said those two words together in front of me. So that evening, because we still didn't have fiber internet at home in those days, I walked to the local cyber cafe, sat down at one of those rented terminals, and searched it.
I don't remember exactly what the search results said. I remember the feeling more than the facts, the sense of a door opening onto a room I hadn't known existed, filled with things I suddenly wanted to understand. That one search at a cyber cafe is, as far as I can tell, the actual beginning of everything that followed.
At home, I had a Dell laptop already sitting there, mostly unused for anything more ambitious than whatever a kid usually does on a laptop. That started to change almost immediately. First came a phase I look back on now with a mix of fondness and mild embarrassment, the hacker phase. I found a Kali Linux image somewhere, downloaded it, booted it up, and sat there with the distinct feeling that I was about to hack something, someone, anything. I had no target, no method, and honestly no clue what I was doing. It didn't last long. But it did something more important than teach me to hack: it introduced me to Linux, and Linux is where the real curiosity took root.
What followed was a genuinely long stretch of distro hopping, longer and more thorough than most people even realize is possible, and I didn't do it alone. I had a friend who caught the same bug I did, and the two of us turned it into something like a shared experiment, one laptop each, one new distro at a time, comparing notes like a couple of scientists who'd wandered into the wrong lab. It started at the beginning, the way it does for almost everyone: Ubuntu, dependable, welcoming, often affectionately called the Debian God among the kind of people who develop strong, slightly irrational opinions about their operating systems. We'd install it, poke at it for a week, then call each other up to report findings that mattered to absolutely nobody but us.
From there we moved to Fedora, cleaner in some ways, different enough to teach us that not all Linux distributions think alike. And then, eventually, inevitably, we arrived at the destination every serious distro hopper eventually finds their way to, the one that isn't just an operating system but something closer to a personality trait: Arch. I use Arch, by the way. If you know, you know. My friend and I broke it more times than either of us would like to admit, and fixed it just as many, and somewhere in all that breaking and fixing is probably where I actually learned how a computer works.
Somewhere in that same stretch of years, coffee found me too, and it never really left. It became less a drink and more a signal, the thing that shows up right before an idea does, the cup that's gone cold on the desk because whatever I was building mattered more than remembering to drink it. Most of what I know about how I work, I've learned at odd hours with a mug in reach: I don't sit still with an idea for long, I open an editor and start experimenting, poking at code just to see what it does, less interested in planning the perfect version than in seeing the thing move. I build first and ask questions later.
The honest, less flattering half of that habit is that I'm not much of an iterator, once something works well enough to prove the point to myself, the itch that made me start it is usually already satisfied, and I've moved on to the next one. Because of that, a good number of the things I've built have never seen the light of day, half finished projects sitting quietly in folders, proof only to me that the idea once worked, evidence of a curiosity that cared more about the discovery than the finish line.
And none of that has ever kept sensible hours. I've always been a night person, the kind whose mind actually switches on once everyone else's has switched off, and 3 or 4 a.m. has seen more of my best and worst ideas than any hour in daylight. I've pulled more all-nighters than I can count and lived with a genuine, stubborn insomnia for years, though it isn't always the ordinary kind. More often than not, it's a project doing it to me: if I'm in the middle of something I can still edit, still iterate, still fix, my mind simply won't let it go. It keeps running the problem in the background, turning it over and over, refusing to power down, until the only way out is to give in, open the laptop, and actually work on it. Sleep, for me, has always had to wait its turn behind whatever I was in the middle of building.
All of that curiosity, scattered and self taught as it was, eventually needed somewhere formal to go, so I enrolled in college for a program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning engineering. I'd like to say the story turns disciplined here, that the boy who once walked to a cyber cafe out of pure curiosity became a focused, dedicated student the moment he had a formal syllabus in front of him. That would not be honest. I barely studied. Most of my exams were survived rather than earned, carried through on a mix of sheer luck and a handful of well kept notes borrowed at the right time, rather than any real academic discipline.
College ended the way college ends, with a degree and very little certainty about what came next. What followed was a full year, not a metaphorical one, an actual full year, of applying to places and hearing no, over and over, in every polite and impolite variation that rejection comes in. Nobody writes a highlight reel about that year, because there's nothing cinematic about refreshing an inbox and finding nothing in it. But it happened, and I lived through it the same quiet way most people going through it do, without an audience, without a soundtrack, just one application at a time, one more coffee at a time.
And now, on the other side of that year:
I'm an AI Engineer.
Looking back at the whole shape of it, none of it moves in a straight line. A kid who wanted to reach space became a kid who wanted to fly toward it, then became a kid chasing a phrase he'd never heard before. A hacker phase that taught nothing about hacking but everything about curiosity. An operating system obsession, shared with a friend just as stubborn as I was, that had no practical purpose beyond wanting to understand every layer of the machine. A degree survived more than studied. A year of closed doors. A desk full of unfinished builds and cold coffee, each one a small proof that I was still awake at 3 a.m., unable to sleep until I'd tried the thing my mind wouldn't stop turning over. But every one of those detours, looked at honestly, was doing the exact same quiet work underneath the surface: keeping the curiosity from that cyber cafe evening alive long enough to outlast the first ten, twenty, however many no's it took to finally hear a yes.