Software is nothing without hardware. I started my career in IT as a teenager managing the computer hardware and networks in a small SME company that was consulting for electrical installations. I grew up building PCs, installing Windows and hooking up small computer networks with coax cables (remember Lantastic?).
When I started my computer science studies I discovered what actually happened on the electronic gate level, assembly level inside the operating system, but I quickly moved to the software that was running a couple of abstraction layers higher.
I’ve always been fascinated with finding out how things work, and as the world slowly moves back from the cloud to sovereignly controlled compute I picked up my old interest in running my own bare metal machines and Kubernetes clusters.
As phones and other devices are becoming repairable again, I decided I wanted to learn how to do repairs myself as well. While my dad was often tinkering with cables and soldering irons I never picked up on this skill. I quickly figured out that doing repairs is a surefire way to get closer to the internals of electronics, learning about PCBs, traces and components leading into an interest in microcontrollers and embedded programming that shows great synergy with my interests in the Rust programming language.