Roy Schroedel

Most people sat down at their computer to do something specific — play a game, print a document, watch a video. I usually ended up somewhere completely different. Not playing, not working — just poking around, wondering how any of it actually worked.

Back when I was much younger and a lot more naive, I cracked open a binary for the first time, stared at what looked like pure noise — and genuinely thought that whoever could make sense of it must be some kind of genius. I didn’t know yet that there was an entire discipline behind it, that people spent years mastering tools like IDA just to peek beneath the surface. But somehow that incomprehensible wall of bytes fascinated me more than it discouraged me.

Nobody taught me to code. There was no course, no mentor, no structured path — just curiosity and a stubborn refusal to leave things alone. I’d dig into game files without knowing what I was looking for, move things around, break something, fix it by accident, and somehow end up with a result that worked. That trial-and-error loop was my classroom.

That’s still what drives me today.

Over the years I’ve worked across more languages, systems, and stacks than I can reasonably list — and I wouldn’t have it any other way. At some point things shift: once you’ve truly understood several languages at a deeper level, picking up a new one stops being a challenge and starts being a formality.

The syntax changes, but the way things fit together rarely does.