2026-01-30
How I Kind of Accidentally Ended Up in IT
Looking back, my path into IT wasn't a straight line drawn on a career map. It was more like a chaotic doodle that somehow turned into a full illustration.
Okay, real talk: I never actually planned to work in IT. Like, at all.
If you’d asked 2015 me what I wanted to do, I probably would’ve mumbled something vague about being an F-18 hornet pilot and then gone back to trying to crash someone’s website for the lulz with a bunch of highschool friends.
Back then I was that classic teenager who thought breaking stuff was the coolest thing ever, typical nerd. Downloading random hacking tools from sketchy forums using the hacked neighboors wifi, copy-pasting SQL injection and XSS payloads I barely understood, running tiny DoS scripts with friends from our laptops in the dark garage away from adults like we were in a movie, phishing other highschool student's accounts, Script-kiddie 101. I didn’t even really get that well how any of it worked. I just loved that little adrenaline hit when something actually broke.
Then one random afternoon at my brother’s place it all came crashing down (figuratively, thank god).
He walks in, sees my screen, and I freeze like a deer in headlights. I’m expecting the full “you are never to touch anything that is connected to the internet” speech... but he just starts laughing. Like, properly laughing. Then he goes quiet for a second, looks at me, and says:
“Dude. If you’re gonna be this nosy about how things break, at least learn how to build something first. At least that won't get you in prison”
And he literally digs through a drawer and hands me this ancient CD Visual Studio 2008, full install. I’m not even kidding. It probably had a layer of dust older than some of my current coworkers.
That was it. No big dramatic intervention. Just a CD and a sentence that somehow stuck.
He still brings it up at every family gathering. Watch out, one day they’re gonna send a helicopter for whatever you’re doing on that laptop. Everyone cracks up. I just laugh a little and die a little inside.
Anyway.
I didn’t start with some cute little Hello World program. Nope, My first real thing was this stupidly over-ambitious text editor in VB.NET.
It could open files, save them, copy-paste, cut, change font size/color, the works… and because I thought it was hilarious, I also hooked up text-to-speech so it would read whatever you typed out loud in that creepy robotic Microsoft voice from 2005. It sounded like a possessed Alexa.
Was the code a mess? Yes. Did it crash constantly? Bien sur it did. But when I typed "hello world" and heard it say it back to me in monotone robot voice... man. I felt like a Super Saiyan. For real. That feeling never really went away.
I kept making stuff. Tiny apps, dumb utilities, random experiments. And weirdly, that old urge to break things didn’t disappear, it just changed shape. Now I build something, then immediately try to destroy it. I throw weird inputs at it, max out every field, open fifty tabs, flip the computer upside down, refactor the whole thing, break it again, fix it better. Same rush, way less jail risk.
So yeah. That one awkward afternoon + one dusty CD is basically why I’m sitting here writing code for a living in 2026 instead of... I don’t know, doing literally anything else.
Curiosity is a hell of a drug. Just gotta point it at creation instead of destruction.
Photo by Mika Baumeister