He was an IT guy. He'd go out to hospitals to configure their software, run scripts, install systems, all of that. I just thought it was the coolest thing ever.

When I got my own PC I was big into gaming, and I guess I didn't mind sipping the koolaid because it didn't take long before I ended up tinkering with shit I shouldn't have.

I got into forums like HackForums, V3rmillion, and RaidForums. I went by Eggn0g and later FADED. Yeah... I know lol. Keep in mind I was 11-14 years old at the time. 💀

I'm not proud of it, but I'm grateful for it. It taught me so much about my curiosity in tech and programming.

I was on these forums pretty much all hours of the day when I wasn't at school. I'd come home, hop on the PC, and just be in it until I passed out. On top of the forum stuff I was running game servers on the side too. Always had something going.

My parents kinda knew but not really. I think they saw me on the computer a lot and figured it was just games. They didn't know the half of it lol.

The community is hard to describe to someone who wasn't there. Despite so many bad things happening on these forums, the people were genuinely beautiful. It sounds weird to say that about a place where people were cracking accounts and selling RATs, but it's true. You really saw people for who they were. There was no pretending.

I looked up to a lot of people and built quite a reputation myself. A lot of the friends I made during these days I still carry with me today. We grew up together on those forums. Some of my closest friendships started in a DM at 2 AM.

Cracking accounts, selling them, RATing, mining crypto on infected hosts, you name it. If there was a way to make money on those forums, I was probably doing it or trying to figure it out.

It was definitely a wild and questionable time, and it's not the kind of thing I'd condone these days. But honestly, I was always doing something. Always building, always scheming, always learning.

Naturally, all of this led to me getting my first real footing in programming. I started building my own tools from scratch. The first thing I really dug into was making bruteforce and cracking tools, including a Spotify account checker that ended up being faster than anything else out there at the time.

I built a Selenium automation connected to a Flask page. User would buy, get a license key, put the key in the site along with their email and country, and the Selenium bot would go to Spotify, log into one of the cracked accounts, and invite them automatically. The whole thing was self-service. At 14 lol.

Am I bragging? No. But it's to show that I always have had a knack for finding new endeavors.

The transition to going legit was honestly just a natural thing as I got older. The Spotify thing grew really big and I started worrying about real implications. As I started getting real jobs, I just didn't find a need to do shady things to get by anymore.

At the time I didn't think I was gaining any real skills. I was just some kid on forums doing dumb stuff. But everything I ended up learning about how the internet works, about networking, about building tools that actually do things, it all started there. All of it.

The spirit of those skid forums still lives in me to this day. It was a big part of my childhood and I wouldn't trade it.