preambles

my first dive into a file system was more interesting than any class. in secondary school, you were only as cool as what rap lyrics you knew, who you could beat in a PES multiplayer game, or how fast you could manually configure GPRS internet on a Java or Symbian phone without sending settings to 3888. my escape, like most of the other boys, was to sit in a corner of the library, far from the librarian's glare; she never had time for us anyway—and talk about football, our crushes and mobile games.

modding mobile themes was another form of side quest. you started by downloading a Bluetooth FTP from some unsecured site, giving it permission to your phone's Bluetooth, and granting it read and write access to directories and applications. working on this, with equal parts excitement and fear of breaking things, was far more fun and interesting than the other stuff.

it meant dabbling in your phone's inner life: the file systems, the configs that made up an application layer, the buildup stream at compression time after altering the last .nth file. and getting a well-pixelated theme packed and running on your crush's phone meant getting a kiss when the school balcony was empty, a free lunch from the cafeteria, or compassion to soften the embarrassment if you got punished in math class for getting an arithmetic problem wrong.

naturally, this curiosity spilled over into the web. it was the era of .tk domains, the holy grail for curious teenagers trying to build a site for free. if you could manage to pair a free .tk redirect with a sketchy web host or a wapka template, you'd outcool the others still trying to boost their star status on 2go—because you had a live URL. i built a simple one where i put pictures from my final days in school.

none of this was software development in the way i understand it today. i wasn't writing code or thinking about system architecture, just curious like the other boys, that there were parts of the phone hidden under the GUI everyone else tapped, that changing a file in one place could alter something somewhere—that was more fun and exciting than anything else. the preambles to years of the same question trailing quietly underneath every software abstraction i come across. why does this work?