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I don't remember the first time I saw an airplane. What I do remember is the feeling that a machine so heavy could leave the ground and simply stay there, calm and certain, thousands of meters above everything I knew. As a young child, that feeling never really left me. I was the kid who pressed his face against the airport window long after the plane had taxied out of sight, still trying to work out how it all fit together. The more I learned about aviation, the more one question kept pulling me in: how does a plane actually know what to do? Autopilot holds a heading. Flight management systems calculate routes down to the minute. Dozens of small, invisible systems talk to each other, correct each other, and keep hundreds of people safe without anyone touching a single dial. Somewhere behind every one of those systems, I realized, was a person who had written the instructions. Someone had to teach the machine how to think. That was the moment aviation quietly handed me off to software development. I didn't choose to stop loving planes, I just found out that the thing I loved about them was really about code all along. Years later, that thread hasn't broken. It just grew a second half. I still fly on VATSIM, in X-Plane 12, following real routes and real procedures with people around the world doing the same thing on their side of the screen. But now I'm just as likely to be on the other side of the panel, not flying it but building it. I write Python interfaces for WinWing CDU hardware, translating raw hardware signals into something a simulator understands, and contribute to MobiFlight, an open-source project built by people who had the same question I did as kids and never stopped chasing the answer. There's something quietly satisfying about wiring a physical switch to a line of code and watching a virtual aircraft respond exactly the way it should. It's the same wonder from the airport window, just with a terminal open next to it. That's really what pulled me into this field, and what keeps me here: the sense that behind every system that looks effortless, someone sat down and built it, piece by piece, until it worked. Whether that system is an autopilot or a Django application, the process is the same, you break down something enormous into small enough parts that a computer can follow them, and then you test, and fix, and test again, until the complicated thing behaves simply. This site you're reading right now is a small example of that same instinct. I built it, deployed it on my own homelab server, wired up the reverse proxy, sorted out the SSL, and got the pieces talking to each other , not because any of it was required, but because I wanted to understand every layer of it myself, the same way I once wanted to understand every layer of a cockpit. I don't know exactly where this path goes next. But I know it started with a kid watching planes disappear into the sky, wondering who was in charge of all those systems and I know I'm still, in my own way, trying to be that person.