Middle school, I was writing little Visual Basic programs for no reason other than curiosity. In high school I picked up German, French, and Spanish, and started swimming competitively. It’s not a sport that rewards shortcuts, and I swam through Division 1 in college. That discipline is probably where a lot of my work ethic actually comes from.
I studied International Affairs and German at UNH, then Computer Science at Salem State. Both times, life and finances pulled me out before I finished. So I went and learned the rest anyway: servers, CMSs, databases, the parts nobody teaches you until something breaks at 2am and you have to fix it yourself.
That’s when the real education happened. I was living with my aunt, a life coach, and managing a Linux server for her business. MySQL, PHP, file permissions, ufw, cron jobs, email routing, cPanel. I learned it because it needed learning, not because it was assigned. She influenced how I think about this work as much as the tech itself did.
Somewhere in there I found Raspberry Pis and never really stopped playing with them. Home servers on Ubuntu Server, port-forwarded straight to the open internet. Most people have no idea you can just do that.