Code was the first thing nobody could take.

I taught myself to build through sheer obsession and repetition.

Then, from Solidity and Python, I moved on to lower level languages like Rust and C, and then to blockchains. I built my own, badly at first. Then a genuine obsession with decentralization, because of what it actually is. A system nobody can shut off, run by nobody, permissioned by nobody. The first thing I'd ever encountered that couldn't be revoked.

Open-source crypto repositories, line by line. Thousands of lines a day. Not copying. Rewriting. Taking a function apart, understanding what every piece did and why it was there, then writing it again myself. That's how you learn syntax. It's also how you learn what good code actually looks like, and how an experienced developer was thinking when they wrote it, which is a different and much rarer thing. Hacking mastery out of other people's experience.

For a while I did web3 bug bounties, and built my own pentesting tools for it. It stopped holding my attention. I started building my own applications instead, and going deep on the protocol problems that don't have clean answers yet: privacy, tokenization, gamification.

Then computational neuroscience, from the same instinct. I was fascinated that a brain could be simulated in code at all, that neural networks and high-performance computing could carry the work of tissue. I built a model of part of the hippocampus and watched it replay sequences on its own, the way a sleeping brain does.

That tied me to the obsession I still have. Integrating artificial intelligence with the human brain. Giving a machine memory that actually holds. It has a name now, Daedalus.

Before code I competed. Shooting, then powerlifting, decorated at both. What that gives you isn't discipline, exactly. It's a specific relationship with failure. You go back. You correct. You go back again. You run the trial, read the error, change one variable, run it again. Nobody who has done that for years finds debugging difficult. It's the same loop.

Along the way I ran an AI and deep-tech consultancy, and did work in Horizon Europe research funding, which taught me more about institutional software than any course would have.

But the thing that actually happened is simpler than any of that.

Code gave me power that didn't need permission. Nobody had to pick me. Nobody had to approve it, fund it, or agree that I was ready. I could build something on a Tuesday and it either worked or it didn't, and no one on earth had a vote.

That's still why I do it.