Before it became a job

When I was fourteen, I discovered you could run your own game server.

Imperium Online was this MMORPG that nobody outside Latin America remembers probably. For me it was an incredible game, a place where I could spend hours. I had friends I had never seen in person. I spent hours chopping trees to build my boat so I could show it off in the center of Nix. My dueling skills were terrible, so I tried to avoid any contact with people outside the cities, though I still died many times. I remember waking up at 5 AM before school to go mine in the dungeon, I barely remember anything from my adolescence, but I can draw the map from memory to this day.

My friends and I played Tierras Perdidas, a fork of Imperium. One night messing around, we discovered something. Someone had leaked the server files, a weird zip archive with a mess of assets and a tutorial so long it could have been a book. No YouTube walkthroughs, no Stack Overflow. Just a text file written by some anonymous person who had figured it out before you in a forum we used to visit. We instantly decided to build our own server: Tierras Porteñas.

I don't think I slept. Not because I couldn't, but because sleep wasn't even a possibility anymore. My brain had entered a rabbit hole of pure enjoyment, the kind where hours pass and you don't notice.

I'm twenty-eight now. I work as a blockchain developer.

I chase that feeling every day. In my job, looking for the interesting problems, volunteering for the gnarly bugs. In side projects I start at midnight and abandon by morning. In new languages, new tools, anything that might crack open that door again.

It gets harder every time. I have to admit that.

So why blockchain?

I think it was easier to find these gems back then. The early internet (not so early, I am not that old) was smaller, weirder, full of people building things just to see if they could. That world mostly disappeared. But I think blockchain is one of the few places where it still exists. It reminds me of those early internet days. People building in the open, sharing code, figuring things out together. Real problems that nobody has solved yet.

What made it possible

I've been trying to reverse-engineer what's missing.

Part of it was the uncertainty. We had no idea what we were doing. That tutorial wasn't a guide, it was a dare. Every small victory felt like ours because we actually fought for it.

Part of it was how immediate everything was. You changed a config file, restarted the server, and something happened. It worked or it exploded. No filing tickets for a staging environment. No waiting three days for testnet tokens. Just action and consequence, right there.

Part of it was that nobody was watching. We weren't building Tierras Porteñas to impress anyone. No demo day, no metrics. The only people who cared were the ones building it.

And part of it, maybe the biggest part, was that failure was free. If we broke everything, we'd just start over. Nothing was at stake except our own curiosity.

Still looking

What I know so far: the feeling needs room to breathe. It needs problems without obvious solutions, feedback loops fast enough to feel like conversation, and stakes low enough that you can fail in interesting ways.

Blockchain gives me some of that. Not all of it, not consistently, but enough that I keep showing up.

I'm not fourteen anymore. I can't spend three days straight in a terminal. But I'm learning where to look for the gaps.

This isn't a conclusion. It's a checkpoint.

Inspiration

• bonnycode.com
• kyrylo.org