In fifth grade, I had my first real encounter with a computer — in a hot, overcrowded lab filled with tangled wires, floppy disks, and greasy keyboards. Between typing lessons and sneaking onto Neopets, I didn't know it then, but that dusty computer lab planted the first seed of curiosity that would one day lead me into tech.
Customizing my Xanga page with sparkly cursors, autoplay music, and falling stars — copying snippets of CSS and JavaScript I didn't understand, and learning through trial and error. It wasn't formal, but it was my first taste of coding — and the moment I realized I could shape the internet, even if I didn't fully know how yet.
I was just a kid with an HP desktop, a lot of curiosity, and maybe too much empathy for my mom's wallet. This is a reflection on the early memories that quietly shaped my path to becoming a software developer — from blue screens to black boxes, and all the restarts in between.
