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. It started with a question I couldn't put down in grades eight and nine — how does a company like Google run a backend in a dozen languages at once? The answer, polyglot microservices, became the thing I love most. Then I went looking for how the giants actually began, and the pattern floored me: every one of them started in a room. Google was two Stanford students — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — with a storage array they'd cased in Lego and a server farm crammed into a campus storeroom. Facebook was Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm, TheFacebook running on a single rented server. Nobody waited for scale; they engineered toward it from the first version.

And it compounded. Google became two billion lines of code in a single repository, tens of thousands of engineers, and products the size of Android and YouTube. Amazon turned its own plumbing into AWS and reset the bar for what a few thousand engineers could operate. Netflix streamed billions of hours and invented chaos engineering to survive itself. Notification systems like Duolingo's learned to fan out to hundreds of millions on a schedule — and live platforms to absorb the entire internet arriving at once. I read how WhatsApp held hundreds of millions of connections on Erlang and FreeBSD with a team you could count on one hand, and it 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 watched the talks that tell the truth about it: InfoQ, QCon, GOTO, 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.

I've founded and shipped more than one venture since — and I own every decision in each.

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