I was taking things apart before I had a word for it. Toys, electronics, anything I could get a screwdriver into, I'd open it up just to see how it worked, and then I'd try to get it back together before anyone noticed. It didn't always go back together right. My mom was not a fan. Sorry, Mom.
I didn't know it at the time, but that was reverse engineering. Nobody hands a kid that word. I just knew that understanding a thing meant opening it up, and putting it back together was the real test.
The moment that actually pointed me somewhere came a little later, back when computers were still round in that early-2010s way and everyone was sharing files off USB drives without thinking twice about it. There was a piece of malware going around that would duplicate itself and hide all your files, so your computer looked empty even though everything was still on it, just buried and multiplying. It hit my computer. Fixing it cost money. The IT guy didn't charge me full price, but he still charged me. It happened again a second time, and by then my mom had had enough. She made it clear this wasn't going to keep being a paid subscription.
So I had to figure it out myself. That sent me down a real rabbit hole, learning what the malware actually did, how to rebuild a system from nothing, how to create and mount an ISO, how to build a bootable flash drive that could kick a machine back to life. None of that was taught to me. I found it because I needed it. And somewhere in the middle of that, fixing my own problem instead of paying someone else to fix it for me, something clicked. That was the epiphany, even though I wouldn't have called it that then. I just knew I liked this more than almost anything else I'd done.
I've never really backed down from a technical problem since. That's sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing, ask anyone who's watched me refuse to walk away from something at 2am. But the lesson underneath it stuck with me: people will often try to tell you what you can't do, or charge you for access to something you could learn yourself, instead of just showing you. Initiative is what closes that gap. Figure it out, stay persistent, and stop waiting for permission.
That's really what this whole site is. I'm not chasing a paycheck with this work, I'd be doing some version of it whether anyone paid me or not. It's part of my DNA at this point, not a job description. The one regret I have is not documenting the journey earlier. So much of what I built over the years just lived in my head or on some VM that got wiped and rebuilt a dozen times since. This portfolio is me fixing that, late, but not too late.
If nobody ever reads this, that's fine too. This was always just me putting that same energy from taking apart toys as a kid into something that lasts a little longer than an afternoon.