How I got started programming

Published on Jun 22, 2026

Tags: programming, biography, systems, low-level, kernel

I decided to write down a bit about how I originally got into computers and coding. It all started when I was 12 years old, when my dad taught me Perl. That was my first real introduction to writing scripts and getting things to run.

After that, I just kept building on it. For the next 12 years, I spent my time diving into different systems and learning a bunch of languages.

The Toolkit

During those 12 years, I heavily focused on learning C, C++, Java, ASM (x86), and Ruby. Working with x86 Assembly and C gave me a good understanding of low-level systems, while Ruby became a great tool for writing clean scripts.

Along the way, I also picked up a little bit of Rust, Python, and Perl 6 (raku). To figure out how the web side of things worked, I learned javascript and some web design stuff, like html, css, and a little bit of xhtml.

Down to the Silicon

As I got deeper into programming, I wanted to know exactly how everything worked under the hood. Over the years, I've learned pretty much everything about computers from the chipset and bootloader level on up.

Instead of treating operating systems like a black box, I've spent hours exploring the NetBSD and Linux source code to see how they handle things at the core. To actually apply that, I've built a simple bootloader from scratch, written my own kernel, and even patched BIOS images to manually unlock hardware virtualization features like VT-x.