My first hack, at eight, was setting the family Windows 95 clock back a few days so the game trials would reset — forever.

I grew up in a modest household where buying software wasn't really on the menu, but the trial timers had a weakness and I had a system clock and an abundance of free time. I reasoned, with the airtight logic of an eight-year-old, that the game had simply never specified which year it was. It did not argue back. I like to think of it as my first responsible disclosure — I just never got around to filing the report.

It worked for years before I understood why, and by then the hook was set. Not the free games — the gap. The distance between how a system is supposed to behave and how it actually does. Hand me a rule and I want to know exactly where it stops being true. I've been chasing that gap ever since.

I took the scenic route into it. Two master's degrees — one in mathematics, one in data engineering — which taught me to reason precisely and to distrust any result a single instrument confirms. That training runs through everything on this blog: prove the primitive, control the baseline, never conclude without a witness.

But the pull was always toward the thing I actually love. Rather than settle into a data career, I chose the work that keeps me curious — crypto trading on one side, ethical hacking on the other. Two disciplines that reward the same instincts: patience, adversarial thinking, and a stubborn refusal to accept a comfortable story over a proven one.

What I chase now is the improbable challenge — the bug everyone assumed wasn't there, the boundary that was supposed to hold. This blog is where the security half of that gets written down: the classes, the reasoning, and the traps, so the next person doesn't have to relearn them the hard way.