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

Since then, I've been going down one tech rabbit hole after another. I've rebuilt my PC multiple times and replaced 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's almost ten years old now and still works, although these days it only holds Steam games because I'm pretty sure it's going to die eventually.

I spent a lot of that time messing around with Linux and installing what felt like every distro imaginable, from Ubuntu to Gentoo. No, I never tried Linux From Scratch, and honestly, I probably never will.

Eventually, I settled on Arch Linux as my daily driver. Part of that is probably because SteamOS is Arch-based, and some part of me keeps insisting that Proton must run better on Arch because of it, even though that's 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.

All that distro hopping eventually got me into self-hosting and Linux system administration. I started running 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 Pi was a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4 GB of RAM. I've since moved everything to a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM and a GeeekPi P33 M.2 NVMe M-Key PoE+ HAT, powered through a TL-SG108PE switch. For storage, I use a dock with two 12 TB WD Plus HDDs running RAID1 on Btrfs.

The current setup is connected through Tailscale with the Mullvad add-on. It hosts Jellyfin, GitLab, Pi-hole, qBittorrent, Caddy, Nginx, Open WebUI, Uptime Kuma, Kiwix, JDownloader, OpenGist, and a few smaller things.

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 It's just sitting there with an outdated Linux version, running 24/7 and wasting resources for no reason.

I got some experience with Cisco Packet Tracer while preparing for my exams, too. I don't use it anymore, but it helped me understand networking a lot better.

Most of what I know comes from online resources and a lot of trial and error. In the beginning, that mostly meant YouTube. These days, I usually stick to documentation or Udemy courses.

I mainly write Python and C. When a project gets more complex, I sometimes reach for Rust instead. Having crates available is convenient in much the same way Python's libraries are, and embedding files is less annoying than it is in C. I'm still much more comfortable with C, though, and I'm still learning Rust.

A lot of my personal projects involve crawling and scraping websites with Python. That's probably what I spend the most time on. I enjoy parsing pages, collecting metadata and other information, automating things, and seeing what kind of data I can extract. I usually start with static crawling and switch to browser automation with Playwright, mostly through Patchright, when that isn't enough.

I like understanding how things work in detail, which often means rebuilding something that already exists just to figure it out. I've done that with sorting algorithms, hash algorithms, HTTP servers, HTTP proxies, Punycode, and even full adder logic, which I recreated in Minecraft lol. Knowing how to use something is useful, but I usually end up wanting to know why it works and what's happening inside it, too.

Reverse engineering is another interest of mine. Figuring things out is interesting on its own, but patching things and solving CTFs is also just fun. I mostly use Ghidra for that. Every few years, I end up messing around with my Digispark BadUSB, bootloaders, payloads, evil twin setups, and phishing sites, or writing annoying malware. I like breaking things and figuring out how they work.

My main project is AniWorld-Downloader, which I started in April 2024. It's fully free and open source, and I want to keep it that way. No paid-only features, no ads, no tracking, no analytics. Just the code needed to get things done. Since then, it's grown to over 300 stars on GitHub and almost 200k downloads on PyPI. Along the way, I've met a lot of people through it, and some of them have become close friends. Sometimes it started with an issue or a PR, and we just kept talking from there. Now we talk every day, hang out in voice chats, play games, and get to know each other's stories. One of the friends I met through the project lives about 650 km away, and I've made the trip there and back twice now to spend time with him. I never expected a downloader to lead to all these friendships and memories, but I'm really thankful it did. The Discord server keeps growing, and it means a lot that people stick around, help each other, and contribute their own ideas and code. I'm still working on the project, and I enjoy seeing what we can make of it together.

Outside of tech, I've been trying to take care of my mental health, and journaling has become part of that. I've been doing it almost every day for about a year now. It's helped me reflect on decisions I've made and think a bit more about the ones I'm making now and what I want to do in the future.

Music is a big part of my life, especially metal. I'm a metalhead, and some of the stuff I listen to gets pretty crazy. Some of my favorite bands and artists are System of a Down, A Perfect Circle, Type O Negative, Evanescence, Megadeth, Avenged Sevenfold, Trivium, As I Lay Dying, Falling in Reverse, Lamb of God, Gojira, Meshuggah, Ne Obliviscaris, Shadow of Intent, Infant Annihilator, Dimmu Borgir, Beast in Black, Battle Beast, Unlucky Morpheus, BABYMETAL, and many more.

I listen to a lot of Touhou music, too, especially Demetori. They're probably my favorite band of all time. I've been listening to the same albums for years and still haven't gotten tired of them. They went four years without releasing an album and then randomly came back with another one in 2022. I'd love to own all their CDs one day, but they're ridiculously rare and expensive.

Besides that, I listen to jazz, J-rock like Yousei Teikoku, and a lot of the metal you randomly discover through osu! maps. I play osu! myself, so quite a bit of my music taste 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. With friends, I'm usually happy to play whatever seems fun.

I'm not really into shooters. I'll play some Counter-Strike occasionally if friends ask, and I used to play PUBG, but these days I'm much more into visual novels and stuff like that. A friend recommended Eternum to me, and I absolutely loved it. It's so well done, and it got me into reading a few more gooner visual novels afterwards.

I used to watch a lot more anime, and I still keep track of everything on AniList, but lately I've mostly stopped watching it. I couldn't really tell you why. I just don't feel like it much anymore, although I still watch something every now and then. My favorite genre is obviously ecchi, but that's far from the only thing I watch, so don't get me wrong.

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

Speaking of guitar, I own two: 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 with Neural DSP plugins like Gojira, Nolly, and Fortin Nameless, although these days I mostly stick to Nolly's default presets. I still kind of suck at playing, though.

As for where I want to go with all the tech stuff, I guess I just want to keep following those rabbit holes. It's 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 actually enjoy learning this stuff, so it rarely feels like something I have to force myself to do.

I don't think I want to go much deeper into application development beyond my own projects and hobbies. I enjoy writing software when it's something I want to build, but I can't really see myself doing it every day for the next forty years. That sounds way too stressful to me. Linux system administration feels much more like something I could see myself doing long term.

Thanks for taking the time to read all of this.