I grew up in a computer lab, but I spent most of my time pirating books onto my Kindle. I did well enough in school, but I realized early on that the risk-to-reward ratio of studying just really sucked.
So while my friends went to tutoring, I spent time online, in competitive games, or on BB Code forums. I write more about this as a preface to some adventures in crypto here, but essentially this all coalesced into my internship at Helius. And I'd started from literally nothing! My sophomore year was spent catching stand-ups at midnight, pushing commits before exams, and teaching developers twice my age how to use our RPCs.
Junior year, I started my IB diploma, and at the same time, joined RevisionDojo. I worked alongside two-ish other engineers as we scaled from 3,000 to almost 200,000 students; we also got into YC's F24 batch. This all coincided with the advent of GPT-4, and I'm pretty confident that we worked on some of the first AI-generated lessons ever. I really think we chipped at the ratio. Hitting publish while sick on our off-site and seeing almost twenty thousand lessons created hours after release (during summer!) is still a core memory of mine.
Huge wall of text I know. For something more fun, try to guess the lie: I was going to the highschool library back in elementary, I've lived alone since middle school, I've ranked top 7, 50, and 1 on the main leaderboards for Tetris, competitive Pokemon, and trading perpetuals.