The Collapse and the Rise

In 2020, COVID hit. I was fifteen years old. The structures that had contained my restlessness, school, routine, the daily rhythm of being told what to do and when, the bells, the schedules, the assignments designed to keep you busy rather than to teach you anything, collapsed. For the first time in my life, I had uninterrupted time. No one telling me what to learn next. No curriculum. No fragments. Just days that opened up and stayed open, and a question that wouldn't leave me alone: how does this all work? That is when I entered programming. Not through a course. Not through a bootcamp. Not with a mentor or a curriculum or anyone holding my hand. I started with HTML, trying to understand something fundamental, something almost philosophical: how do websites even exist? How does something appear on a screen from nothing? How does a set of text files become a page that someone on the other side of the world can see? That question, how does nothing become something functional, was the real entry point. I wasn't learning to build websites. I was trying to understand the principle that made digital existence possible. The code was just the evidence of the principle. The principle was what I was after.

Then came VBA. I was automating tasks in Excel, starting to see how logic could interact with real tools, how a set of instructions could do work that humans would otherwise repeat endlessly until their eyes went dry. That was my first encounter with the idea that code isn't just for display, it does things. It acts on the world. It saves time. It eliminates drudgery. The philosophical became practical, and the practical felt like power.

Then Python. The first language that felt general-purpose, where I could actually express ideas rather than just automate small tasks. Python was the first time code felt like a language in the full sense, something you could think in, not just write in. It had a grammar of possibility. You could say anything in it, build anything with it, if you understood the syntax and the logic.

Then JavaScript, because I wanted things that lived inside the browser, things that reacted in real time, things that responded to a person the moment they clicked or typed or moved. But JavaScript came to me differently than the others. I didn't learn it from tutorials. I didn't follow a curriculum. I learned it from the code itself.

Here is the truth of how that happened, and I know how it sounds, and I know who will believe it and who won't, and I've stopped caring about the difference: I would take open-source JavaScript projects, Node.js applications, browser tools, code I found on GitHub, and I would try to run them. And they would break. Of course they would break. Dependencies missing. Versions mismatched.

Configurations wrong. Errors spilling down the terminal like rain in April. And instead of giving up, instead of closing the terminal and finding a tutorial, I would fix them. I would read the error messages. I would research what they meant. I would trace the problem back through the stack until I understood not just what was broken, but why it was broken, and what the code was actually doing beneath the error.

That was my JavaScript education. Not tutorials. Not documentation. Just code that didn't work, and me refusing to let it stay broken. I learned the language by healing it. I learned the logic by restoring it. Debugging was the real teacher. Errors were the real curriculum. Every red line in the terminal was a lesson, and I read every single one.

Now here's the joke: who's going to believe that? A fifteen-year-old Kenyan kid, no formal training, no bootcamp, no mentor, learning JavaScript by fixing broken open-source projects in the middle of a pandemic? It sounds like a lie. It sounds like exaggeration. It sounds like one of those inspirational stories people make up for LinkedIn engagement. But it is the truth. And the gap between that truth and what people are willing to believe, that gap has been the central tension of my entire journey. The truth sounds like a lie when it comes from someone like me. And that, right there, is the whole problem in one sentence.

At the same time, I was exploring hardware and networking. Not because I had a curriculum or guidance, but because I was curious about what was happening underneath the software. How machines communicate. How systems connect. How data actually moves between physical components, through copper, through fiber, through air, through signals I couldn't see but could learn to understand. No one told me to study this. I just couldn't accept the software layer as the whole truth. I needed to know what it was built on. I needed to understand the entire stack, from electrons to interfaces, from physics to applications. If I was going to understand the machine, I was going to understand all of it.