I was rewriting my LinkedIn bio recently.
You know that weird exercise where you try squeezing years of curiosity and random obsessions into a few lines? I realized what I actually wanted to say didn't fit in a bio.
So here's the longer version.
The Generator Outside the Theatre
One of my earliest memories is from when I was around one or two.
My family used to take me to theatre shows during festivals. Big stages, actors, lights, music, the whole spectacle. I wasn't interested in the play.
I'd convince my mom to take me outside so I could stare at the massive generator powering the stage. That machine humming away beside the pandal, the thing that made the lights work and the microphones function, that's what I wanted to understand.
Even then, I was more curious about what powered the system than the performance itself.
Around the same time, I apparently decided I wanted to become a road roller driver. Those giant construction rollers fascinated me. Looking back, it was never about the job. It was about the machine.
The First Computer Rabbit Hole
The next big moment came in class 1, during my first computer class.
Our teacher pointed at the screen and said: "This is Windows XP. They're making a new version called Windows 7."
That stuck with me. The operating system itself was evolving. People somewhere were building the thing we were using. I couldn't stop thinking about it.
After that, I went down the rabbit hole. I grew up experimenting with whatever technology I could get my hands on:
- Running 2G internet on keypad phones
- Emulating GBA and Nintendo DS games
- Sideloading Java apps onto old Nokia phones (one of which I accidentally bricked with a virus)
- Flashing custom ROMs on Android
- Discovering Linux and learning to break and fix systems
None of this was structured. Things would break. I'd try to fix them. Sometimes I'd break them even more.
But every once in a while something clicked, and I understood how the system actually worked. Those moments felt incredible.
Engineering as a Way of Learning About Reality
Over time I started seeing engineering differently.
Most people think of it as applied science. But it goes deeper than that.
Engineering is how we generate new data about reality. When you build something, a rocket, a chip, a distributed system, you're not just applying known knowledge. You're running an experiment against the real world. It either works or it doesn't. When it fails, you learn something new about how the universe behaves.
Build → observe → understand → build again.
It's not just about making tools. It's about pushing the boundary of what reality allows.
A First-Principles Mindset
This way of thinking naturally leads to a first-principles approach.
Rather than accepting existing boxes, roles, industries, categories, I prefer breaking problems down to their fundamentals. What are the actual constraints? What's happening underneath the abstraction? What's the simplest truth of the system?
From there you rebuild. Sometimes that means leaving familiar territory entirely.
If a problem feels interesting or important enough, I'll drop the existing boxes and work on something harder or completely different. Boundaries between fields are often artificial. Reality doesn't care about categories.
The Influence of Science Fiction
A lot of this mindset was shaped by the science fiction I grew up with.
Foundation made the future feel like something that could actually be engineered, a civilization shaped by mathematics and technological progress. Steins;Gate captured the obsession that comes with pushing the limits of what's possible.
Good science fiction makes the future feel buildable. It turns engineering into a frontier, not just a profession.
Status Games vs Love of the Game
The tech world has a lot of status games. People optimizing for titles, prestige companies, signaling intelligence. The focus becomes appearing impressive rather than building interesting things.
That's not what drives me.
I'm not in engineering because it signals intelligence. Not because it's trendy. I'm in it because I genuinely love the game.
That moment when a complex system finally works. Understanding something deeply. Building something real from scratch. That's the reward.
Two Things I Keep Returning To
My curiosity mostly orbits two areas.
Core computer science, the deep internals. Operating systems, distributed systems, AI, infrastructure, the machinery underneath modern software.
Building products people actually want, where technology becomes a tool to create something useful.
Sometimes those two overlap. Sometimes they don't. But both scratch the same itch: building and understanding systems.
Still the Same Curiosity
The curiosity hasn't really changed since childhood.
Back then it was a generator beside a theatre stage. Today it might be a distributed system, a kernel, or a piece of infrastructure.
Different machines. Same curiosity.
I hope that never changes.