Build. Break. Repeat.

It started in grade 7, and it started twice.

One half of me wanted to build. The other half wanted to know how everything worked well enough to take it apart. I never had to choose — they turned out to be the same skill pointed in opposite directions.

The building came from the internet's first great teachers. Two short films from Code.org lit the fuse — the one that said the people who write software get to build the future, and the one that said most schools won't teach you how. So I taught myself. I grew up inside thenewboston and Derek Banas — the legends who put real programming on YouTube before it was a career move — and Eli the Computer Guy, who walked me through servers, Linux, and the unglamorous machinery underneath the magic. Then the lectures: MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford, Harvard's CS50. I wasn't collecting certificates. I was collecting the way serious people think.

The scale came later, and it never let go. In grades eight and nine I couldn't stop wondering how a company like Google ran a backend in a dozen languages at once — and the answer, polyglot microservices, became the thing I love most. I read how WhatsApp ran hundreds of millions of connections on Erlang and FreeBSD with a team you could count on one hand, and something clicked: the most interesting problems live at scale, where one good decision compounds across a billion requests and one bad one breaks the whole model. I studied how the best in the world build — Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Uber — and I watched the talks that tell the truth about it: InfoQ, QCon, GOTO, and every I/O and WWDC. I wanted to be in that room.

The breaking came from a different corner of the same obsession. A TEDx talk by a top hacker showed me the other side of the mirror — that every system is a set of assumptions, and every assumption is an invitation. Then DEF CON, and the culture around it: understanding something completely means being able to defeat it. The Anonymous documentaries. Later, George Hotz — pure, natural talent, live; I watched the streams and the archives until some of the instinct rubbed off. I learned web exploitation and binary exploitation and hardware the way I'd learned to build — by doing it until it was instinct.

You cannot defend an architecture you're incapable of attacking.

The rest was fuel. Google I/O and Apple WWDC keynotes. Joma Tech's Startup series and the whole FAANG-YouTube era — the Silicon Valley hype, mainlined. Silicon Valley, twice through. Mr. Robot. The Social Network. The Internship. Peter Thiel's Zero to One. The documentaries on the founders who bent the industry around them — Page and Brin, Jobs, Musk, Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Torvalds, Drew Houston. The films from inside Google's datacenters. I saved the ones that mattered into a playlist, so I'd never lose the thread.

That kid wanted to build at the scale the best engineers in the world build at, and to understand systems deeply enough to break them.

That's not a memory. That's the job now. It's Syrosin.