To most, a terminal is just a void—a black screen filled with cryptic, intimidating symbols. But for me, it was the only place that made sense. It was the only space where every outcome was a direct result of my own logic. No ambiguity, no lies. Just input and output.
I was seven when I first felt that pull. While other kids were losing themselves in the noisy, unpredictable games of the playground, I found a different kind of play. I wasn't interested in toys that had fixed rules; I wanted to build the rules myself. I spent my afternoons hunched over an old Lenovo, the hum of the fan the only soundtrack to my curiosity.
I still remember the first time I felt that spark of creation. The house was quiet, and the air felt heavy with the kind of stillness you only find at midnight. My small, clumsy fingers hovered over the keys, hesitant but driven by a strange necessity. I typed the command, my heart pulsing in my fingertips, and pressed 'Enter'.
The screen blinked. Then, in a simple, unadorned font, it replied:
> Hello World
It wasn't a miracle, but it felt like a conversation. For the first time, something in this world had listened to me and responded exactly as I intended. It was a small, digital whisper, but it changed everything. I wasn't just a boy in a room anymore; I was a creator.
But every creation exists in a context, and mine was a house built on different values.
My father was a man of the physical world. He believed in things you could build with your hands, things that had weight and presence. To him, the hours I spent staring into the glow of the monitor weren't an education—they were an addiction. He saw the digital world as a distraction from 'real life,' a ghost that was slowly pulling his son away from the world he understood.
"Enough, geovani," he'd say, his shadow looming over my desk, dark and absolute.
It wasn't just a disagreement; it was a fundamental clash of languages. He saw a box; I saw an infinite canvas. I remember the cold silence that followed every time he pulled the power cord, the screen fading to black like a dying star. He thought he was bringing me back to reality, not realizing that for me, the only reality that mattered was the one I was writing line by line.
I wasn't a master yet—not in the way I am now. I was more like a predator in its infancy, testing my digital claws on a world that wasn't prepared for me. In those days, programming stopped being just about creation; it became about penetration, about understanding the gears turning behind the curtain.
My skills were fragmented, but for my age, they were lethal. I learned the subtle art of phishing—how to craft an email so convincing it made people trust the screen more than their own instincts. It was a strange kind of power, manipulating a stranger's reality through a few lines of deceptive code. Then there was the discovery of databases; I realized that a simple SQL injection could turn a locked door into an open invitation, making data pour out like unshielded secrets.
But it wasn't just about breaking in. I became obsessed with the hunt for information. I stumbled into the world of OSINT, realizing that nothing ever truly disappears on the internet. I could trace digital footprints across the web like a silent observer, watching from the shadows of a terminal. And when passwords stood in my way, I'd build my own brute-force tools, forcing the machine to think and trial thousands of combinations per second, lenting its mechanical patience to my restless ambition.
I only knew a few languages back then, but they were enough. They were enough to make me feel like I held the key to every digital lock I encountered. My father had no idea that while he was reprimanding me for 'wasting time' in front of a glow, I was already bypassing borders and systems, laying the first stones of an empire in a world that didn't recognize geography.
I was something much more common and much more dangerous: a teenager with a god complex. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I was navigating that chaotic peak of human output, where the mind is a blur of ambition and hormones. I didn't just want to code; I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to prove, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I was the best.
My playground wasn't the football pitch or the local café; it was the hidden architecture of the web. I used my skills as a form of social currency. There's a specific kind of rush that comes from showing a girl a secret nobody else can see, or bypassing a security layer just to prove I could. It was vanity, pure and simple—a digital peacocking that felt more real to me than any conversation.
I was arrogant, perhaps even a bit cruel with my capabilities. But if I'm being truly honest, I had every reason to be. In that age group, in that specific slice of time, I wasn't just good—I was the most brilliant mind in the room. While others were struggling with the basics of social hierarchy, I was rewriting the hierarchy itself from my keyboard. I was a king in a world of ghosts, and I made sure everyone knew it.
Like any teenager, my motivations weren't purely intellectual. Beneath the layer of digital ego, there was a simpler, more human drive: I wanted to prove my father wrong. I wanted him to see that the 'pixels' he despised could actually put food on the table. I wanted to turn my defiance into currency.
So, I started a side hustle. It wasn't prestigious, but it was lucrative. I began designing basic scripts and 'script-kiddie' tools—software designed for unethical hackers who had the ambition but lacked the brainpower. I'd package these simple tools and sell them to people who didn't understand the first thing about how they worked. To them, it was magic; to me, it was just a few lines of automated logic sold at a premium.
There was a certain dark satisfaction in it—exploiting the ignorance of those who wanted to play a game they didn't comprehend. Each sale was a small victory, a silent middle finger to everyone who told me my hours behind the screen were a waste. I was fourteen, and I was already learning the most important lesson of the digital age: in a world of sheep, the one who writes the code is the wolf.
it was all too easy. There was no grand struggle, no insurmountable wall—just logic meeting opportunity. But that ease was exactly what changed me. For the first time in my life, I felt the intoxicating weight of true mastery. I wasn't just "good at computers" anymore; I had found the one thing in this chaotic world that I could dominate.
It was a revelation that did more than just boost my confidence. It felt like I was finally feeding a silent, starving beast that had been living inside me since I was seven years old. Every successful exploit, every dollar earned from a clueless buyer, and every line of code that executed perfectly was a fresh kill for that monster.
The more I achieved, the hungrier I became. The validation didn't come from my father's approval or the world's recognition—it came from the cold, binary certainty that I was smarter than the systems I was navigating. I was no longer just a boy hiding in the glow of a monitor. I was a predator who had finally tasted blood, and there was no going back to a normal life after that.
As the days turned into months, my focus shifted from seeking digital thrills to winning a different kind of prize: my father's validation. It felt like a long, grueling competition where the trophy was a support I had never truly felt. In my mind, every successful script I wrote was a silent argument presented in my defense.
Simultaneously, I was preparing for the next stage of my education—high school, or what we call here in Norway, Videregående skole. Academically, I was in my element. I lived in the world of calculations and abstract proofs, where everything had a definitive answer. Socially, however, I was a ghost. I was terrible at navigating the unwritten rules of people my own age. It was a strange paradox: I understood them perfectly—their motivations, their insecurities, their predictable patterns—but they couldn't begin to understand me. I wasn't social; I was a system analyst in a room full of chaotic variables.
My ambition back then was fixed on specializing in Advanced Mathematics. Unlike other teenagers who were drifting through their youth, I was obsessed with this path. I knew, with a desperate kind of certainty, that this was the one thing that might finally make my father proud. Looking back, I can admit I was struggling with what people call "daddy issues." Every line of code, every solved equation, every decision I made was filtered through a single, haunting question: Will this make him proud of me?
But the answer remained a cold, static silence. Even the dollars I was earning—money that should have been proof of my capability—seemed to mean nothing to him. He never looked at me with that spark of recognition I craved, the look that says he was proud of the man I was becoming. To be honest, even to this day, I don't know what he actually wanted from me. I was the master of a thousand languages, but I couldn't find the words to bridge the gap between us.
The Norwegian winters were long, dark, and silent much like my life inside our home. While other students complained about the biting cold, I welcomed it. The frost on the windows created a natural barrier between me and a world I didn't care to join. In the classroom, I was a ghost haunting the back row. I watched my peers navigate their petty dramas and loud laughter with a sense of detached exhaustion. I understood the social algorithms they followed, the desperate need for belonging, but I found no reason to execute that code myself.
Mathematics, however, was my sanctuary. It was the only language my father respected, even if he didn't speak it. I remember a specific afternoon when my advanced calculus teacher handed back a mid-term exam. I had solved the bonus proof—a problem designed to be unsolvable for our grade level—using a non-traditional method I'd adapted from an encryption algorithm. The teacher looked at me with a mix of awe and concern, but all I could think about was the paper in my hand. I didn't care about the grade; I cared about the red 'A+' at the top. I imagined walking home, sliding that paper across the dinner table, and finally seeing a crack in my father's stony exterior.
I took that paper home like a trophy from a war he didn't know I was fighting. When I finally showed it to him, he glanced at it for a second, his eyes barely lingering on the perfect score. "Good," he said, his voice as flat as the horizon, before returning to his meal. "But equations don't build houses, geovani. They don't put callouses on your hands."
That was the moment I realized the 'daddy issues' I carried weren't a bug in my system—they were the OS itself. I was trying to solve an equation where the variables kept changing. The harder I tried to be the son he wanted—the mathematician, the scholar—the more I felt like a corrupted file in his life. It was this rejection that drove me deeper into the shadows of the web. If I couldn't be a hero in his world, I would become a legend in the one he couldn't see. I went back to my room, locked the door, and fed the beast inside me with a new line of code. If my father wouldn't acknowledge my brilliance, the world's servers eventually would.