The very first thing I remember about computers was how they smelled. Something new, completely alien, but welcoming. Inviting. Like a door I didn’t know existed had just swung open, and whatever was on the other side already knew my name. It was 1990. I walked through. I never came back out.

The room wasn’t much to look at. Cracked concrete walls, paint peeling in sheets, heavy wooden tables that had probably been there since before I was born. My mum worked at the national mining institute, the kind of place that sat at the very heart of what a communist country valued most. Metals. Output. The collective. But sitting on one of those wooden tables, humming quietly to itself, was something that didn’t belong there at all. A PC. The only one I’d ever seen. Possibly the only one anyone in my world had ever seen.

An engineer, a colleague of my mum’s, a man she’d asked to show me this strange machine, was browsing the internet through a text mode browser on a screen that could display sixteen colours at most. Sixteen. Today that would barely qualify as a screensaver. But I wasn’t seeing the limitations. I was seeing what it was connected to. Through a phone line, through a dial-up modem, through that crumbling wall and beyond the country’s borders, something vast and borderless and alive. In a room built to serve the state, a box was quietly whispering that the walls weren’t real.

I didn’t have the words for it then. I just knew how it felt. It felt like home. Not the home I was living in, I was six, my parents had divorced, the world felt fractured and uncertain in the way it does when you’re young and things don’t hold together the way they should. This was something else. A place that didn’t care where you came from, what your family situation was, what country had built the walls around you. It just let you in. That machine, that room, that engineer with his sixteen colours and his text on a screen, that was my family. And I have been trying to protect that feeling ever since.

The three years between that first encounter and the start of high school moved fast. My regular visits to my mum’s workplace paid off in ways I couldn’t have predicted. By the time I walked into my first day at high school in 1993, I was already somewhere my classmates weren’t. Not socially, that’s a different story, but technically. I knew things. I could do things. And like most tools in the hands of a curious teenager, that knowledge cut both ways.

The good: I taught myself Pascal, then C++, then network protocols, then scripting. Real languages, real logic, real power, each one opening a door the previous one couldn’t. The bad: I used all of it to map open ports on the school network, find unprotected servers, exploit poorly designed systems. I stole teachers’ passwords. Locked accounts. Phished. Impersonated. Nothing malicious, I want to be clear about that, because intent matters, and mine was always curiosity and the quiet thrill of finding a door someone forgot to lock. I never broke anything I couldn’t fix, never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve a mild inconvenience. I was just a kid pulling on threads to see what unravelled.

Outside school, there were the internet cafes. Sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. In Eastern Europe in the mid-nineties, those places had a particular atmosphere, monitors glowing in dim rooms, the sound of dial-up handshakes and keyboard clatter, people hunched over screens like they were reading secret messages, because in a way they were. Chat rooms. Games. Forums. The early web in all its chaotic, undesigned glory. I went because I needed to. The same way I’d needed to walk through that door in my mum’s office four years earlier. These places were an extension of home, the one that had no cracked walls, no borders, no permission required.

This was my cyberpunk era. And I wore it completely without knowing what to call it.

In 1997 I started university. Electrical engineering, my mum’s idea of a proper future. Computers, she felt, were not a serious career. The irony of that has aged beautifully, though she would never quite admit it.

I didn’t argue. I enrolled. And then, at nineteen, I opened my own internet cafe.

For five years I lived a double life. Engineering student by day, defender of the internet by night. The cafe was never really a business, I was too young and too distracted by what it actually was, which was a training ground. Every system I had to secure was one I’d previously known how to break. Standing on the other side of that barricade changed something in me. Exploitation requires curiosity. Defence requires understanding. For the first time I had to think not just about what was vulnerable, but about why, and what it meant to be responsible for something other people depended on.

It was during these years that Linux found me. Or I found it. Either way, it was immediate. Love at first sight in the most literal sense, the kind that doesn’t fade because it isn’t really about the thing itself, it’s about what the thing represents. Open. Transparent. Yours to inspect, modify, and understand completely. No black boxes. No hidden agendas. No one owns it and therefore no one can take it from you. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but Linux was the first system I’d encountered that matched my values, not just my skills.

By the time I finished my degree in 2002 I had also met the person who would become my manager, and then my mentor. Some educations happen in lecture halls. The important ones happen differently.

From 2004 to 2008 I worked for the largest ISP in my city, under his guidance. The cafe had taught me instinct. The ISP taught me rigour, coordinated, structured, accountable. Real systems at real scale with real consequences when things broke. My Linux skills didn’t just grow, they mutated. Became load-bearing. Became identity. By the time I left I wasn’t someone who used Linux. I was, irreversibly, a FOSS evangelist. The belief had gotten into my DNA and I had stopped apologising for it.

In 2008 I left the ISP and briefly worked implementing network and security for a large group of companies. It was good work. It also taught me something important: I didn’t want to do this for one employer. I wanted to do it for anyone who needed it. So I opened my own company, translating challenges into solutions, as I thought of it then. Networking, system security, Linux threaded through everything as it always had been.

By 2012 the pull had shifted direction again. I emigrated to Oceania, I’ll keep the location deliberately exotic, and spent the next fourteen years working across Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. First for large organisations, increasingly focused on security. Then, in 2019, as a senior cybersecurity consultant for one of the largest cybersecurity providers in the world.

But the work that mattered most during those fourteen years happened outside office hours.

Quietly, methodically, the way an engineer builds something meant to last, I developed a personal framework for digital privacy and security. Open source tools. Cryptography. Operational security. Not as abstract concepts but as daily practice, things I used, tested, refined, and eventually began sharing with clients. Privacy stopped being a technical domain and became something closer to a discipline. A way of moving through the world.

And then one evening I watched Citizenfour.

If you haven’t seen it, it is the story of Edward Snowden, told in real time as it happened. A man who looked at what he knew, understood what it meant, and made a decision that cost him everything. I won’t tell you what to think about his choices. I’ll just tell you what it did to me. I didn’t sleep properly for three days. Not because I was surprised, I already knew, technically, that the surveillance apparatus existed. But knowing a thing and truly feeling its weight are different experiences entirely. After Citizenfour I couldn’t unknow what I felt. This wasn’t a game anymore. It never had been.

Today I work for one of the largest cybersecurity vendors on the market. In my private time I write about privacy, work with clients on personal privacy strategies, and run community events about why any of this matters. I built this blog with no ads, no analytics, no trackers, served from hardware I control, and called it TAZ, a temporary autonomous zone. A small act of defiance. A door left open for anyone who wants to walk through.

That’s what this is. Not a technical skill. Not a career.

A life manifesto.

Welcome.