I got interested in coding in 2016 when a friend showed me a small Batch script with a Matrix-style effect. It was only a few lines printing random numbers in green, but for some reason that was enough to get me hooked on programming.

Since then, I have basically been going down one tech rabbit hole after another. I have rebuilt my own PC multiple times over the years and swapped out pretty much every part at least once. The only thing that somehow survived is the 1 TB Toshiba HDD from the first PC I ever bought. It is almost ten years old now and still works, although these days it only stores Steam games because I am pretty sure it is going to die eventually.

I also spent a lot of time with Linux and installed what felt like literally every distro you can imagine, from Ubuntu to Gentoo. No, I never tried Linux From Scratch, and honestly, I probably never will. That eventually led me into self-hosting and Linux system administration. I started running my own services on a Raspberry Pi and a VPS, and at one point I hosted quite a few Tor relays and open source frontends like Piped, Invidious, Libreddit, and similar projects.

My first Raspberry Pi setup was a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4 GB of RAM. I later moved everything to a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM and a GeeekPi P33 M.2 NVMe M-Key PoE+ HAT. It is powered through a TL-SG108PE switch and uses a dock with two 12 TB WD Plus HDDs running RAID1 on Btrfs. The current Pi 5 setup is connected through Tailscale with the Mullvad add-on. I use it to host services like Jellyfin, GitLab, Pi-hole, qBittorrent, Caddy, Nginx, Open WebUI, Uptime Kuma, Kiwix, JDownloader, OpenGist, and a few other smaller things.

I also have an Oracle Cloud Always Free VPS, although I am not running anything on it right now and probably never will. It is basically just sitting there with an outdated Linux version, running 24/7 and wasting resources for no reason.

Most of what I know came from online resources and a lot of trial and error. In the beginning, I mostly learned through YouTube, but nowadays I usually stick to documentation or Udemy courses. I mainly use Python and C. If a project becomes more complex, needs an ecosystem with crates similar to how Python has libraries that can be imported easily, or I want to embed files without dealing with how annoying that can be in C, I usually go with Rust instead. I am still much more comfortable with C though, and I am still learning Rust.

A big part of what I do now is crawling and scraping websites with Python. That is probably what I spend the most time on in my personal projects. I really enjoy parsing websites, collecting metadata and other information, automating things, and seeing what kind of data I can extract. I usually start with static crawling, and if that is not enough, I switch to browser automation with Playwright, mostly using Patchright.

In general, I enjoy technical topics and like understanding how things work in detail. One thing I especially enjoy is rebuilding things that already exist from scratch just to understand them better. That includes sorting algorithms, hash algorithms, HTTP servers, HTTP proxies, Punycode, and even things like full adder logic, which I recreated in Minecraft lol. I like understanding not only what is being used, but also why it works and what is happening internally.

I also have some experience with Cisco Packet Tracer from my exams. I used it back then, but I do not use it anymore. It really did help me understand networking a lot better.

Reverse engineering is another thing I enjoy, not only because it is really interesting, but because patching things and solving CTFs is just fun. I mostly use Ghidra for that. Every few years, I also end up messing around with things like my Digispark BadUSB, bootloaders, payloads, evil twin setups, phishing sites, or writing annoying malware, mostly because I like breaking things and figuring out how they work.

After trying so many Linux distributions over the years, I eventually settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver. Part of that is probably because SteamOS is Arch-based, and somewhere in the back of my mind my stomach keeps telling me that Proton must run better on Arch because of that, even though it is probably complete nonsense. I also just like having bleeding-edge software, up-to-date packages, and access to pretty much everything through the official repositories and the AUR.

Outside of tech, I also try to take care of my mental health, and journaling has become part of that. I have been doing it almost every day for about a year now, and it has genuinely helped me reflect on a lot of the decisions I have made, the ones I am making now, and the ones I will make in the future.

I also really enjoy music, especially metal. I am a real metalhead and sometimes listen to some pretty crazy stuff. Some of my favorite bands and artists are System of a Down, Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold, Megadeth, Lamb of God, Gojira, Meshuggah, TOOL, Dream Theater, Type O Negative, Evanescence, Falling in Reverse, As I Lay Dying, Ne Obliviscaris, Shadow of Intent, Infant Annihilator, and a lot more.

I also listen to Touhou music, especially Demetori, which is probably my favorite band of all time. I have been listening to the same albums for years and still have not gotten tired of them. They did not release an album for four years and then randomly came back with another one in 2022. I would love to physically own all of their CDs one day, but they are ridiculously rare and expensive. Besides that, I listen to jazz, J-rock like Yousei Teikoku, and a lot of the kind of metal you randomly discover through osu! maps. I also play osu!, so quite a lot of the music I listen to probably came from there.

When it comes to games, I mostly enjoy story-driven titles like NieR: Automata, Life is Strange, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Borderlands 2. I also play Minecraft, horror games, and co-op games like The Forest, along with pretty much anything that is fun to play with friends.

I am not really into shooters. I will play some Counter-Strike once in a while if friends ask me to, and I used to play PUBG, but nowadays I am much more into visual novels and stuff like that. A friend recommended Eternum to me, and I absolutely loved it. It is so well done, and it got me into reading a few more gooner visual novels afterwards.

I also used to watch a lot more anime and still keep track of everything on AniList, but right now I have mostly stopped watching it. I cannot really tell you why. I just do not feel like it anymore, although every now and then I will still watch something. My favorite genre is obviously ecchi, but that is far from the only thing I watch, so do not get me wrong.

My favorite anime by far is NANA. She once told me she did not think it was something I would like, probably because of its themes and the romance and stuff, but I do not know. She was completely wrong though. I loved every moment of it and even learned the Rose theme song on guitar afterwards.

Speaking of guitar, I currently own two of them: an Ibanez GRX40-BKN and an Ibanez RG421QM-CBB. I usually play through either a Scarlett 2i2 4th Gen audio interface or a Blackstar ID:Core 10 V3. I use Ableton together with Neural DSP plugins like Gojira, Nolly, and Fortin Nameless. Nowadays, I mostly use Nolly with the default presets. I still kind of suck at playing though.

I guess I just want to keep going down these tech rabbit holes because this is probably the most useful skill I have when it comes to making money, so I might as well take it seriously. The good thing is that I genuinely enjoy learning this stuff, so it does not usually feel like I am forcing myself to do it.

I do not think I want to go much deeper into application development beyond what I already do for my own projects and as a hobby. I enjoy writing software when it is something I actually want to build, but I cannot really see myself doing application development every day for the next forty years. That sounds way too stressful to me. Linux system administration feels much more like something I could realistically see myself doing long term.

Thanks for taking the time to read all of this.