When I look back at how I first fell into the world of computers, I land right on my very first machine: an Amiga 500.
An unassuming grey box — but it shaped my youth and rewired how I think about tech.
While other kids were outside, I was glued to a monitor for hours.
Not just to play — but to dissect, tweak, and optimize.
First Steps into the Digital World
The Amiga 500 and my love for detail
The Amiga was never “just a toy” for me.
Sure — games like Lemmings, Oil Imperium, Civilization, or Zak McKracken had me hooked.
But eventually it wasn’t enough to simply play.
I wanted to know: Why does this happen exactly like that — and not differently?
Can you bend the system?
My curiosity went far beyond game mechanics — I wanted to know how the whole thing worked.
Action Replay & Learning to Think in Systems
The real game-changer arrived as a small cartridge: Action Replay.
A cheat tool that let you mess with games: infinite lives, unlimited money, skip levels — suddenly anything was possible.
But for me it was more than a cheating gadget.
Action Replay made something click:
A game is just a logical chain of numbers and instructions.
If you know where they live, you can change them.
That was my first lesson in reverse engineering.
I wasn’t “playing” anymore — I was analysing, poking, breaking limits.
And that was more thrilling than any game.
From Playing to Understanding
You’d think I’d jump straight into programming after that.
I didn’t.
I never had a real urge to write my own software.
Maths wasn’t my superpower.
And the idea of typing code for hours didn’t light me up.
What did light me up: understanding existing systems, streamlining them, and bending them to my needs.
My brain kept asking:
“How does this work?”
and immediately after:
“Can I improve it — or route around it?”
That became my world.
And it still is.
Awe & Aggravation in IT
What I learned back then still drives me now.
My baseline: “There’s always a way.”
If software doesn’t work or boxes me in, I keep digging until I find a path through.
That mindset pulled me into IT — and showed me its biggest weakness: dilettantism.
Nothing frustrates me more than badly designed, needlessly complicated software.
Watching people struggle with inefficient systems — because someone set them up poorly or made them overly complex — makes me nuts.
I’ve seen it professionally too: systems that burn time and nerves when they could be better.
The problem often isn’t skill.
It’s the lack of will to truly understand.
What I Took from All This
That early start with the Amiga 500, Action Replay, and the logic of software gave me something I still rely on:
I’m intensely self-taught.
I teach myself whatever I need, because I learned early:
Every system can be understood. And every system can be changed.
Honestly, I see the human system the same way.
That way of thinking is probably what helped me move past my mental illness.
I analysed and refactored my “borderline system” so thoroughly that, eventually, the diagnosis didn’t fit anymore.
What I didn’t plan for: the alternative program called anxiety — which booted itself right after.
And even if I never got the recognition I craved as a kid from my family, my path into computers gave me something far more valuable:
the ability to read any digital environment at a glance —
and the courage to question the rules that come with it. Always.