Origins

9 June 2024

These are what I believe to be key moments for my journey in SWE.

10 years old (primary school) [2010]

I "hacked" my primary school and got access to Youtube on school computers. It was supposed to be blocked because it wasn't an educational website at the time. I actually just had a friend in high school that showed me a site called VTunnel, which was a proxy website that displayed other websites inside it. I hadn't known accessing Youtube was a bad thing, so I showed a few friends, and they showed friends, and soon a teacher found out and traced it back to me. My parents were contacted, the school principal asked how I did it, and I was banned from using the school computers for 6 months (probably so they could patch the vulnerability). It was the first time I felt real power over adults, I seeked more.

13 years old (high school) [2013]

I found out about torrents and started pirating movies and games. In Australia at the time, access to movies was expensive and extremely limited. Netflix only arrived in Australia in 2015, but even if it was available, I didn't have any money to pay for it. With free access to essentially the entire archive of filmography, I watched hundreds and hundreds of movies. And my favourites of course involved superheros, but the tech related ones that I love to this day include: The Social Network, Ex Machina, Snowden, Her, and the TV show Silicon Valley.

18 years old (university) [2018]

I was studying a Bachelor of Science, getting pushed into becoming a doctor (as all asian kids are), but didn't know if it was for me. So I studied a range of subjects, including biology (pre-requisite for physiology subjects), mathematics, and computer science. I loathed biology, but greatly enjoyed the other two. And that was when I decided to go all in on SWE. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. This was the video that probably sealed the deal permanently.

My favourite quote at 14:00 is "I think that one of the cool things, about this time in technology is that, individuals are leveraged and able to do way more than they ever have been able to do before. ... At no point in the past could you leverage such a small amount of money, to get powerful enough technology to really touch people in a way that you can today." - Zuck.