I spent most of today catching up with an old friend from secondary school. We talked about many things, but one topic stood out: how free browsing led me to tech.

Back in the day, there was a time when the Opera Mini mobile browser was mysteriously free to use for browsing. To this day, I’m not entirely sure why, but we took full advantage of it. We used proxies and came up with all kinds of configurations to get free browsing. It was such a thrilling time.

Soon, we discovered ways to modify (or mod) the Opera Mini software itself. We figured out how to change things like startup screen, the loading text, and so on.

Eventually, that tinkering led me to stumble upon HTML and CSS, and I was fascinated by the possibilities. The more I played with it, the more fascinated I became.

And from there, well, the rest is history.