Saudi Arabia to Tunisia. That's the short version. The longer one involves three languages running in parallel, a childhood spent building an inner framework for how the world works, and a fairly strong suspicion that everything connects if you look long enough.
I believe in God and an afterlife. I'm politically critical of corruption and anything that treats people as expendable. Fair wages, accessible healthcare, functioning education. These feel obvious to me, which is exactly why their absence is so consistently infuriating.
I process everything through writing. The journal has been running for years. Without it I'm just accumulating experience without meaning. With it, I can track the actual arc of where I've been and where things are going.
I'm drawn to tragic psychological storytelling. The human kind, where people break and then have to figure out who they are on the other side of it. That question interests me more than most things.
A long formative friendship with Ijtihed Kilani (now at Supercell in Finland) shaped a lot of who I am. The kind of friendship that expands what you think is possible for yourself.
I hold myself to the same standards I hold others to. If I expect honesty, I give it first. If I expect depth, I bring it. That's the whole thing, really. Mutuality as a baseline, accountability as a practice.
Depth over surface. One honest conversation is worth more than ten efficient ones. I've spent enough time in shallow water to know what I'm missing when I'm there.
Emotional openness is genuinely hard. Harder than most technical problems, and the payoff is harder to measure. I do it anyway, deliberately, because the alternative is a kind of slow calcification I'm not interested in.
Own what you do. Say what you mean. Fix what you break. In that order.
Follow the idea where it actually leads, even when that's somewhere uncomfortable.
Feel it fully. Say it anyway. Most people stop just before that second part.
Same standard for everyone, starting with yourself.
There's an autobiographical project called Waves that's been sitting in the back of my head for over a year. Psychological, tragic, slow. Currently dormant. The thing about a project like that is you either write it or you carry it, and I've been carrying it long enough that at some point the difference stops mattering.
Don't Starve Together, Satisfactory, Valorant (Chamber main), Marvel Rivals. I engage with games the same way I engage with everything else: find the system, understand it, push it. At some point optimization stops being a strategy and starts being a reflex.
I sing, play guitar, draw. These aren't hobbies in the background-noise sense. When the journal runs out of room for something, I reach for one of these instead. Music especially. It's one of the few things that gets past the analytical layer without asking permission.
It doesn't stay in one lane. SCADA architecture, Finnish university systems, game design theory, philosophy of mind, infrastructure patterns. The consistent thread is wanting to know how something actually works and why it ended up built that way. The surface answer is almost never the interesting one.
A friend who got there first made it feel real. Infrastructure work, cold climate, a different pace. I've been building toward it long enough that it's stopped feeling like a plan and started feeling like a direction.
Everything right now, the degree, the projects, the writing, is pointed at a version of myself that has enough space to do the work properly. That's the target.