Hmm, I get asked this a lot so I’ll try my best to respond with the little understanding that even I have… I think it has always boiled down to I really like to get what I want and
I think… there’s not really a time I can remember where I couldn’t code… i had always had access to a computer and I remember being as little as 5-6 typing FAST and dialing up connections … I was probably like 6-7 when I bricked my first computer (a throwaway my family gave me… super super old school laptop)
My dad was an electrician so he had me working on circuit boards and PCs when I was really really small
But my mom says it was even before the age of 3 that they noticed I was doing “puzzles” at an alarming rate and she had 4 babies before me so she seemed to have insight
But it was more than just computer code, it was code in general… I remember being younger than 6 and writing notes in invisible ink for people to find and in 5th grade a kid wrote a note about killing themselves (they did a shitty handwriting analysis and I got called down to the principals to do a handwriting sample- wasn’t me) after that I developed a code language for my 5th grade class to pass notes in so the adults couldn’t read it
By 8, my mom had me learning Hebrew (so I had to learn character symbols and right to left text) and was exposing me to Aramaic and Latin and I was definitely building small machines by then
I spent 13 years with my ballet teachers speaking to me in French and Russian and my family spent time in Mexico/the west so I picked up a little Spanish too (making language easy for me to flex in and out of)
By middle school I was fully obsessed with passing notes using Caesar ciphers and MySpace/Xanga skins so I was FAST at HTML… I would probably say around 11 I was open sourcing those (among other shit) for my middle school classmates
Then we started getting into LAN parties and it turned out I was pretty good at network and hardware stuff too
I was kind of a natural at geometry and hand/paper coding on old drafting tables in high school so I could backend CAD software
And by then (around 16) I realized I had a sort of innate side hustle so the rest was kind of history - the rest gets blurry and I don’t really want to talk about it all here but I’d say it was a mix of just the right inputs at the right age with a pretty significant interest taking something from 0 to 1 and rebellious streak
Blockchain felt intuitive to me… a lot of my family were accountants and I carried a real check book ledger and check duplicate around that my family got me because I liked balancing check books when I was like 7 so it all just sort of came together
Then I put myself through college waiting tables so I had to use POS systems and I just got really good at understanding the programming that went into those
