January 10, 2026

In the beginning, there was a Machine💻

How I picked up software engineering and coding

This is the story of how curiosity 🔍, broken systems 💥, rooted phones 📱, command lines ⌨️, and a lot of trial-and-error 🔁 slowly turned into a career in software engineering.

🏫 2003 — The First Computer Room

My first real memory of a computer isn’t Windows. It isn’t a mouse. It isn’t the internet. 🌐

It’s a clean, air-conditioned room ❄️ in my school with big Zenith computers lined up in rows.

They didn’t boot into Windows.

They booted into LOGO 🐢

You weren’t allowed to click anything. You had to type ⌨️

One day a friend leaned over and said:

“Type win and press Enter.”

Suddenly, a whole new world opened ✨

That moment taught me two things without me realizing it:

Computers listen to commands 🧾

There’s always something hidden behind the surface 🕳️

That was my first encounter with something close to a command line 🖥️

💻 2007 — My First Laptop

Years later, I got my first personal laptop 🎁💻

This changed everything.

This wasn’t a school computer with rules. This was mine 😈

I broke it 💥

I fixed it 🔧

I installed Windows 🔄

I reinstalled Windows ♻️

I formatted it for no reason 🧨

I learned what drivers are because nothing worked without them 😭

I wasn’t “learning computers”.

I was living inside them 🧠💻

📱 2010 — Symbian, Cracked Apps, and the Hacking Phase

Before Android took over, there was Symbian OS 🪦

And Symbian had:

SIS files 📦

Signed apps ✍️

And a very annoying rule: you can’t install unsigned software 🚫

So naturally… we learned how to sign cracked SIS files 😏

Then came:

Custom firmware 🧬

ROM flashing ⚡

Bricked phones 🧱

Revived phones 🧟‍♂️

Bluetooth hacking experiments 📡

And endless forums 🧵

This was the phase where I realized:

I don’t just want to use systems.

I want to to break them and understand how they work.

🤖 Android Rooting and the Linux Rabbit Hole

Then came Android. With it: rooting, bootloaders, recovery modes, custom ROMs. Suddenly, everything that had once been abstract became real — and breakable.

Linux wasn’t part of any curriculum I was enrolled in. But after a few too many nights wrestling with partitions and permissions, it became the OS of choice. Not because I had a plan, but because it was fun and inscrutable and worth figuring out.

What started as tinkering slowly morphed into a deeper understanding. I wasn’t chasing cybersecurity, exactly. I was chasing understanding — how systems hang together, what makes them tick, and what happens when you take them apart.

🎓 College — Computer Applications, But Still Self-Taught

I did my bachelor’s in Computer Applications 🎓

But like most colleges, the real learning didn’t happen in the classroom 🏫🙃

It happened:

At night 🌙

On broken projects 💥

On StackOverflow 🧠

On documentation 📚

On YouTube ▶️

On random blogs 🌍

I remember the first time I truly understood what a function is 🧩

Not memorized ❌

Not wrote because the teacher said so ❌

But understood ✅

That was a turning point 🔁

A function is a
machine inside your machine

📚 CS50, JavaScript, and the First Real Code Feeling

At some point, CS50 introduced me to computer science in a way that felt like someone finally explained why atoms exist. Then came JavaScript — not as an annoying browser language but as a way to build things that actually do stuff.

And somewhere in that mix — between variables and functions and data structures — something shifted. I looked at code not as lines of text but as tools, as processes, as possibilities.

It wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t always graceful. Sometimes it was downright frustrating. But every time it worked, I felt like I understood something a little more deeply.


// A program that says hello to the world

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

🛠️ Dice App

I didn’t release polished products. I released half‑finished tools, messy projects, and apps that only I used. Some didn’t work. Some worked too well. But they weren’t elegant. And they didn’t need to be.

They just needed to exist.

And once they did — enough of them — people started noticing. Internships followed. Opportunities followed. Not because I was polished, but because I built.

🚀 From There to Here

Now I build scalable backends, RAG systems, autonomous agents, and SaaS products. But if I’m honest, the real reason I kept going has nothing to do with modern stacks, frameworks, or fancy tech buzzwords.

It’s the same reason I typed win that first time. The same reason I broke my laptop. The same reason I rooted phones and dove into Linux for fun.

I just wanted to understand.

That never changed.

🌱 If You’re Just Starting

Here’s the thing no one told me when I began:

You don’t need the perfect course.

You don’t need the perfect laptop.

You don’t need a roadmap that looks like it came from a curriculum.

You just need time, patience, and the courage to be confused for a long time.

Because that’s where learning actually lives — in the confusion, in the curiosity, in the “what happens if I try this?” moments.

And if you stick with that long enough…

One day you look up and realize it’s not a hobby anymore.

It’s your work. Your craft. Your thing.

It didn’t start with code.

It started with curiosity.

It’s still running on it. 🚀