My journey with computers started when I was somewhere around 10. My mother had got her first laptop from her job. At some point, it stopped working. Not entirely, but it was clear some sort of signal wasn't getting through. Coming from a family of engineers, craftsmen and artists, tinkering and breaking things was already part of my daily routine. I knew electrical faults existed. In addition to that, I had played with enough Meccano and Lego to be confident in my ability to disassemble something and reassemble it again. The sort of confidence a ten years old in a batman shirt has, except a screwdriver was enough for me. I dissected the beast, in the hope disconnecting everything and connecting it back would fix the problem. It did. I felt proud. After a while, we bought a computer from Eric, a "friend" of my mother. He had used it for a while, and had assembled it himself. He took quite a bit of money for it, assuring my mom it was "cutting edge". I later learned on the playground from his kids and nephews we had bought his "old crappy computer". My mother trusted people too easily. She was gullible. She still is. That's how my father got to her, also, and why she was now a single mother. As such, I was doing quite a bit of helping around the house. At eight years old I was already used to cooking evening meals, doing the dishes, ironing clothes and sheets... I think I was happy to help, because I saw it made my mother feel less alone in it all. So when the computer came in and she started working with Excel, it was only natural I started helping with that too. On evenings and weekends I'd be there filling some endless spreadsheets for her, so we could go on vacation later. If the work wasn't done, vacation shrank until it was, and I didn't like that. I'd be lying if I told you I was only using it to help with Excel, though. A large gesture of that so-called friend upon selling the computer was to give us an old game with it, Need for Speed. I played it constantly. Fast forward hundreds of hours spent on Excel, Need for Speed, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation, SkiFree, Minesweeper and the likes, and I was in high school. I had already copied a few BASIC programs — which I didn't really understand — on my calculator, so I could play Snake during lessons. This was around that time my high school got computers for students, which we could access during breaks. That's when I learned about Matt and le Site du Zéro[^1]. Matt (Mathieu Nebra) was compiling and publishing his engineering courses on this website, along with in-depth tutorials on how to do this and that. I started learning about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, hardware... I was 15 years old, I think. I didn't know anything. I wanted to learn how those magical machines worked. We started discussing those courses with other nerds from the class. I was hooked, and programming was pretty much all I was ever doing in high school. During lessons, I would write programs on paper instead of listening to whatever was going on. Things weren't great at home and I wasn't exactly thinking about the future. At some point I said I wanted to be a software engineer, but people around me and my mother started sharing their opinions on the matter, predicting that only underpaid people from India would be doing that in the future as it was obviously a menial and trivial task that would get outsourced. Others pointed at my poor results in math, as a sign of my lack of engineering skills. They were right, but for the wrong reasons. I kind of hated school at the time, to the point I thought it would be funny to hit a 0 on my overall yearly score during my last year (what really mattered was the final exam, the Baccalauréat, so this was fairly inconsequential), both because my favorite website was called le Site du Zéro and because that would lower the high school's rating by a decent margin (ironically, I remember doing the math back then). In any case, it was advised by others I pursued something more in line with my lack of skills… And so I complied and applied to Law School. My plan failed, my yearly average was somewhere along the line of 2.3 / 20. I passed the Baccalauréat (our final exam here in France), getting the school highest results in the process. It wasn’t a great result I think, but it was still better than everyone else at my school. Teachers came to congratulate me telling things like “I knew you would succeed, I believed in you” when they had been sacking me all year long and had actually told me a week before _not_ to pass the exam and go on vacation instead… I felt disgusted. So off to law school I was, from my ignorance of the fact that one should not take advice from people who haven't walked the walk. I’ve learned my lesson now, which I like to remember by the African proverb _“beware the naked man who offers you a shirt”_. It took 15 years and a pandemic for me to get back in the engineering game. I'm still working through the motions. The most important thing I learned along the way is that _you can learn anything_. It's a matter of curiosity, dedication and having a feedback loop. That's how I learnt English and Russian, bike mechanics, international business law, trail running, yoga and all things that do matter in my life. These things that I didn't know back then cost me a rough 15 years of doing something I love in this world. I didn't waste that time, but I'm sad I didn't get to learn more of the things that are important to me during it. I'm still paying my ignorance debt, though. It has reduced, but it's still heavy on me, I think. I did make it from front-end developer at my previous company all the way to CTO, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t stop here. I don’t want it to. I want to learn more, and share some of the journey here, so maybe it can serve others. A message in a bottle of sorts. It was another one that got me started on le Site du Zéro. Maybe this one will reach someone, too. Maybe it’ll help them navigate the maze. [^1]: You won't find le Site du Zéro anymore, it's now called OpenClassrooms as its founder evolved it into a commercial project. For now you can still find [an archive here](https://poncon.com/sdz/) if interested.