Hi. I'm Tom. And I Once Thought Computers Could Print Dreams.

No, really. Stick with me.

Elementary School

The Spark

I was nine. Weird Science was on. Two teenage boys — absolute disasters, both of them — typed something into a computer and out came a fully formed woman. Printed. Like a document. I watched this and thought, very calmly and very seriously: right, so that's what these machines do. I should get started.

That was it. That was the moment. Not a science fair. Not a visionary mentor. A 1985 John Hughes film with questionable physics and even more questionable teenagers.

We build our dreams from whatever's lying around, I suppose.

High School

The Pascal Incident

Years pass. High school arrives. And with it, finally, my first real programming language.

I sat down at that keyboard like a man with a destiny. The language was Pascal. The mission, in my head, was to recreate Weird Science. What Pascal gave me instead was readln and writeln. Text goes in. Text comes back out. No sparks. No magic. No one stepping freshly printed out of a monitor.

Just a blinking cursor. Waiting. Patient as a saint. Mocking me silently.

I finished the course. I want it noted, for the record, that I felt genuinely and specifically betrayed by the film industry.

But here is the strange part. Something had already taken hold. A low hum. A quiet pull I could not quite name yet. I would not understand what it was for years. And by then it was too late.

College

The Part Where the Itch Became Permanent

Here is the thing about being bad at something you love. You keep going anyway, and eventually, embarrassingly, you get better.

Late in college I stumbled into a logic subject. Proofs. Systems. The slow, satisfying work of tracing how one thing connects to the next. Turned out I had a bit of a Sherlock Holmes wiring inside me. Not the cheekbones, unfortunately. Just the compulsive need to follow a chain of reasoning until it clicks.

Then came Visual Basic. I built an enrollment system. A sales and inventory system. At the time this felt like engineering a spaceship. Reader, it was not a spaceship. But I did not know that, and that ignorance was genuinely one of the great gifts of my life.

Oh and I did graphic design during this period. In MS Word. Posters. Layouts. WordArt. Drop shadows on everything, until the whole thing looked more shadow than design. I had never heard of Photoshop. I assumed professional designers used MS Paint, except with more focus and a steadier mouse hand. Nobody told me otherwise. I have chosen to interpret that as a compliment.

Side note: school presentations meant packing a full desktop setup. CPU, monitor, keyboard, mouse, UPS. Loading the whole thing into a vehicle, hauling it to campus, setting it up, and praying quietly to whatever gods oversee hardware stability. We did not complain. We genuinely did not know we were supposed to.

The dopamine hit of making something work, though. That part I already knew. That part was already wired in.

Master's in Information Systems

One Term

I enrolled. I attended. I left.

It was frameworks for thinking about frameworks. I have processed this and moved on entirely.

Graduate Diploma in Computer Science

The Part That Changed Everything

And then, then, I found it.

Two years of computer science that actually meant something. Logic gates. Binary. Low-level programming. Memory. Data structures. Networking protocols. The OSI model, which sounds tedious and is in fact one of the most beautiful things I have ever encountered.

I did extra coursework that was not required. Not because anyone asked. Not because it would help my grades. Because I wanted to. Because I was the kind of person who does voluntary computer science for fun, and I had finally stopped pretending otherwise.

The moment it all clicked, the moment I truly understood that messages travel through the air as patterns of ones and zeros, like morse code moving at the speed of light, something shifted. Permanently. Irreversibly.

It was, and I am completely serious, a nerd's version of a religious experience. I sat there quietly for a moment. I think I may have teared up slightly. I am not confirming that, but I am not denying it either.

This was not just learning anymore. This was a lifelong pursuit. A curiosity that, once lit, never really dims. I did not know it then, but I was not building a skill. I was building a life.

The Internet Years

When Skills Compounded

After the diplomas came the real compounding. The internet, in all its chaotic, wonderful, slightly resourceful glory.

Lynda.com on bootleg CDs, always a few versions out of date, completely indispensable. Treehouse for JavaScript. Frontend Masters for when I wanted to feel both smarter and slightly humbled. Traversy Media on YouTube, clear, no-nonsense, never wasted a minute. Kyle Simpson's books. The Django Cookbook. CS50. Udemy. FreeCodeCamp. Paid ebooks. Courses acquired through channels I will describe only as creative.

The list kept growing because the curiosity never stopped. One thing led to the next, and the next, and somewhere along the way the line between studying and just living dissolved entirely. I stopped looking for it. It was not coming back.

Software engineering by this point was not a career. It was closer to an addiction. A bad itch you scratch and it just gets worse. A dopamine loop that fires every time something builds and runs and works. I was not chasing a salary. I was chasing that feeling. Still am.

AIM Master's in Entrepreneurship

The Business of Actually Mattering

At the Asian Institute of Management I learned something that sounds simple and is anything but.

It starts with the customer.

COPIS. Customer, Outputs, Process, Inputs, Suppliers. The model exists to remind you that value flows from the outside in, not the inside out. It starts with what the customer actually needs, what problem they have, what pain they are living with. The solution is something they are willing to pay for. Not something you think is brilliant. Not something you fell in love with at two in the morning while building it. Something that solves a real problem for a real person.

And that is the trap, by the way. Falling in love with the product. With the feature. With the elegance of your own solution. Engineers do it. Founders do it. I have done it more times than I will admit here. You build the thing, you polish the thing, and then somewhere downstream you discover the misalignment. Costly. Sometimes very costly.

What AIM gave me was the discipline to start from the other end. Customer delight is not a nice-to-have at the end. It is the whole point. There is a lot more to unpack here, and I will, just not today.

Still Going

AI and the Chapter I Did Not See Coming

Then AI started moving. Fast. Faster than felt comfortable.

For a brief and genuinely unsettling stretch I thought the profession might be over. Not declining. Over. I sat with that thought for a while.

Then I thought about it longer. And I realised software engineering had not died. It had evolved. Expanded. The ground had shifted, same as it always does, and the people still standing were the ones who moved with it.

So I enrolled in Ed Donner's AI and LLM engineering courses on Udemy. I wanted to understand what was actually happening under the hood. Not the hype. The architecture. The mechanics. The honest shape of what this technology is and is not.

I am still in it. Still learning. Still that nine year old kid who saw something extraordinary on a screen and thought, immediately and without hesitation: I need to understand how that works.

The technology has changed completely. That instinct has not moved an inch.