Where It Started
I was born in New Jersey in 2005. My family moved a lot — Tennessee first, then Florida, Texas, back to Florida, and now California. Every move meant a new place, new people, and learning to adapt fast. That instinct stuck with me.
The Spark
I started coding around the age of 13, and it happened almost by accident. I walked into my brother's room one day and found him building a Swift app and a website simultaneously. I asked him what he was doing. His answer was simple: "Google it."
So I googled JavaScript. That was the beginning of everything.
Freelance Years
By 15 I had landed my first paid contract — a website for a YouTuber. That commission kicked off two to three years of freelance work building websites, platforms, and dashboards for clients. I met incredible people during those years and learned more from shipping real projects than any course could teach.
While running commissions I was also trading stocks and crypto throughout high school. Building things and understanding markets at the same time gave me a different lens on how technology creates value.
Casino Industry
For six months I worked in the casino industry on the software side. I built real-time concurrent systems for managing games and users, helping scale over six platforms. It was fast-paced, high-stakes work that forced me to think about concurrency, reliability, and systems at scale in ways I hadn't before.
Thinking Differently
I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism at the age of seven — what's commonly referred to as Asperger's syndrome. It was never a limitation. It was a gift. It gave me a kind of creativity and intensity of focus that made me think differently from everyone around me. That difference became my edge.
Family
Both of my parents came from the medical industry. My father was a chiropractor for twenty years. My mother was a nurse. Neither of them were in tech, but they gave me the discipline and curiosity that made everything else possible.
Education on My Own Terms
I dropped out of high school and got my GED to focus on building businesses and working on things that actually mattered to me. I knew that four to six years down the line, America would look completely different with the growth of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence. Sitting in a classroom felt like standing still.
I never fit in at school. I was always focused on things outside of it — commissions, code, and building the next thing. My strengths were in math, history, English, and science. I also attended the Wendell Krin Technical High School's cybersecurity program for three years. Most of the material I was already familiar with, given my background in programming and networking from the projects I had been working on.
Now
Today I'm 20 years old, running multiple companies, maintaining open-source projects, and writing about everything I learn along the way. Every product I've launched started the same way — I hit a problem, got frustrated that no good solution existed, and decided to build one myself.
That instinct hasn't changed since I was 13.