Before I knew it was a job, I just wanted to understand the machine.

My first computer in my hands at five. If I ended up here, it’s because of my dad: at home he passed on far more than computing — a taste for electronics, the urge to understand how machines work, to open them up, to not be afraid of them. The machine was never off-limits, it was a playground. I clicked everywhere, took things apart, started over. I didn’t know yet that it would fill my whole life — let alone that it could become a job.

The real spark came from David, my computer teacher in fourth grade. He used a wheelchair, and one day he showed me how to set an animated GIF as my desktop wallpaper. In 2009, to me, that was pure magic. That same year I typed my first lines of Visual Basic — I didn’t understand all of it, but I could feel I was really talking to the machine, giving it orders.

Real code, I first touched it inside Minecraft. In Java, I built my own items — objects that didn’t exist until I wrote them into being. Watching an idea appear in a world just because I’d typed the right line… that never let go of me.

Then I wanted other people to play in my worlds. I started hosting my own Minecraft servers. That’s where I met what still drives me today: IP addresses, ports, the way one machine finds another. Infrastructure — long before I knew it had a name.

Around fourteen, I spend hours repairing things: computers, phones, mine and other people’s. Swapping a screen, replacing a battery, unlocking a device, reinstalling a system. The more I opened machines up, the more I understood how they held together — the hardware as much as the software. That curiosity for electronics, I owe to my dad.

At fifteen, my first WordPress sites. Publishing something at an address anyone, anywhere could open — that was another kind of magic, bigger than the first.

A year later I moved to PHP. My first real applications: forms, databases, logic that decides. The site was no longer a storefront — it was software that did something.

At seventeen, I write my first modules in Ruby on Shopify. It’s my first encounter with another language and the e-commerce ecosystem: extending an existing platform, plugging my code into other people’s, and seeing it run for real merchants.

At eighteen, my first real production server. No more sandbox: real users, things breaking at 3 a.m., and the responsibility of keeping it all standing anyway. I learned as much from the outages as from everything else.

At twenty, I move into the cloud — over five years ago now. AWS. I build my first real infrastructures: solid, and above all built to iterate on. In parallel, my first Next.js apps; I’d touched Node.js younger without fully getting it, and now, finally, it all clicked.

At twenty-one, we launch our own e-commerce store — one we’d later sell. I’m behind the whole infrastructure on AWS: distribution and CDN, databases, scaling. I also write dozens of PrestaShop modules to bend it to our needs. For the first time, my code and my infra directly serve a business that’s mine — every optimization shows up in the numbers.

At twenty-three, I deploy dozens of EC2 instances. The ‘one server’ reflex becomes ‘a fleet’: load balancing, scaling, monitoring — and the question that has never left me since: is all of this actually sized right, or are we paying for nothing?

Step by step, I got serious about the craft: shipping to production, tracking and optimizing costs, architecture. Turning an idea into a system that holds, without waste. From the kid setting a GIF as his wallpaper to the engineer sizing infrastructure — that’s exactly what I do today, at Stralya.