A friend of mine was a sysadmin at a once massive internet company data center and was a Linux guy since being a kid. Sadly, he died. Then a couple of years lat

A friend of mine was a sysadmin at a once massive internet company data center and was a Linux guy since being a kid. Sadly, he died. Then a couple of years later I was trying to hack a PSP to play free games. PSP hacking was dominated by 12 year old kids that had no idea how to document what they were doing, and it was a painful experience, but I was determined. Later I got my hands on a second hand android phone, wanted to hack it, I did (and it was much easier) and then I decided to get my hands on a laptop. I wasn't going to have a toy without also hacking it, and I remembered my friend so I tried what he once tried to get me to do, I've never gone back. Since then it is just a fact of life for me, the people around me use products and I use tools. They bend to the design of their products and I bend my tools to what I need. Later I got into programming at a job, a boss asked me to do something over a week while he was out of town to test my capability, I had never programmed (besides doing some HTML as a kid out of boredom, I got pretty good at it and then lost access to computers for many years but that is a different story) and within a week I had taught myself a language and built a sort of predictive tool. He was impressed, and I began developing that tool full time and it was a core part of the department I worked in until I left. Since then I've learned some other languages and built some cool things for myself. I no longer work in tech for personal reasons, but I still find building complex abstract machines with my mind and fingertips very enticing.