Table of Contents
early life
I started programming when I was around 12 years old, in late 2011. At the time I was experimenting with flash games, specifically games made with Adobe Flash.
I was horrendous at it. Mind you, I considered myself a dollar store script-kiddie hacking my way through ActionScript 2 to then ActionScript 3.
But I found a small niche, making game trainers for different flash games. And no, not the memory manipulation type things you can do with Cheat Engine, that was a bit too advanced for me then, but rather decompiling the game's *.swf file and attempting to find functions that I can use and create a wrapper program around the 'hacks' I would implement. It was pretty simple since there was at the time very little security around these hobby and small games, but also flash in general.
my professional start
College was a really not an affordable goal at the time, and graduating High School from a small town in Louisiana, not much extra curricular opportunity presents itself there. So the next best option was to enlist in the military, particularly the US AirForce.
Not much can be said there, I spent some time as a military policemen, gaining both friends and valuable experience. I'd say there were times when shit would hit the fan but the amount of times we've trained for those specific scenarios helped a lot.
However, I did meet an amazing mentor there. SSgt Baze. Bad-ass name, no? He was someone I looked up to a lot. Not because of his excellent skill set, but because he was an impeccable leader, whenever he would walk into a room, people knew that person is someone to truly rely on. He would later influence a lot of my decisions during and after the military.
college life
After the military, I was feeling that gung-ho high for a while and actually started as a criminal justice major at LSU. Seeing as though I wanted to join any three letter agency, since SSgt Baze was augmented as part of OSI.
But after a while I knew, that it wasn't something I put all my heart into. I mean I don't think it was really challenging so to speak, but rather I found the entire idea and my two years time doing it, extremely boring...
So, I then moved from Louisiana and back to San Antonio Texas, where I spent my entire military career at. I did this because they have a huge NSA compound there and the UTSA was considered a decent university for CyberSecurity or computer science adjacent degrees.
I began my computer science at a decent community college in the city, to get my grades high enough in STEM courses so I can transfer to UTSA.
And I gotta say, I was actually horrendous at anything that's not 'general programming', as in I was extremely bad at Math. How bad you ask? Part of the STEM entrance program they have at the school, we all go through a 'skill-checks', one of those skill check questions was:
$\sqrt{144}=$
Yes.... I didn't know what the fuck to do there. Now in fairness, I don't know if I was just not in the right state of mind to answer that question, but I completely blanked on it. A super embarrassing moment for me, which will haunt me for a while... The answer is 12 btw.
So they put me in one of the lowest possible Math classes in that college, Elementary Algebra. It was only for half a semester, after passing that class they would move you to Intermediate Algebra for the rest of the semester. This was not a good start. But at least I get to relearn the fundamentals.
The material for Elementary Algebra was bone dead easy, simple calculations like division, order of operations. Intermediate Algebra introduced equations and expressions.
Needless to say, I got an A in both of those classes.
Unfortunately, life happens, and ultimately I moved to the bay area with my sister. Which coincidentally houses the worlds biggest tech companies. So I'm set, right? Surely...