So I used to sell crack and heroin. I will be honest, in retrospect I didn't enter that lifestyle by choice but none the less - it ended up consuming me. Maybe it was because of the money, the freedom, the risk, the power and respect, but what I really think I gravitated towards in the lifestyle was that I was good at it. Now a completely useless skill but I was good at what I did. Earlier in my life I was living on the streets and got taken in - groomed essentially, by a dealer, who became my mentor (and boss). Coincidentally he, "Irish Gary" was also the most terrifying man I have ever met in my life - coming from someone who sold crack and heroin, lived on the streets, been to prison and even a few mental hospitals; that is really saying something. It was he who taught me how to sell; how to avoid the police (which didn't work forever); how to hide things; how to check if you're being followed and all these skills that I really excelled at picking up and implementing. He found me while I was living on a pile of cardboard boxes in a sleeping bag in a carpark. Each morning a security guard would come kick me and some other homeless people out, each night we would make our way back in for some shelter at least. Yet, he gave me somewhere to stay and all I had to do was work for him. A simple decision.
I had started taking drugs at 14 mostly smoking weed, which lead to self medicating my, at the time undiagnosed, bipolor disorder with boatloads of Xanax, when I was manic, so I would calm down and reconnect with reality. And mountains of Amphetamine, when I was depressed, so I would feel good enough to not want to kill myself. My mental health, drug abuse and selling led my mum to not want me around so at 16 I was homeless for the first time. I was put in a hostel, coincidentally surrounding at-risk youth with at-risk adults who are much farther along in their addictions and habits, is not a great idea. I spiralled and soon enough was sectioned and sent to a mental hospital to treat the intense psychosis induced by one of my manic episodes. I thought the bakery staff at the local supermarket were plotting my murder and following me in the form of shadows who could turn into trees when spotted. Clearly, I had disconnected from reality quite a lot and this had been going on for quite some time.
It was when I got out of hospital and quickly became homeless again, due to my at the time unchanged and still broken relationship with my mother, that I met "Irish Gary" and a new chapter of the chaos I called life began. Here, it wasn't really a love of selling drugs but instead a love of learning, an intense work-ethic and level of discipline I developed that I loved. I loved excelling at something, doing something I enjoyed and was good at. I could directly see the result of how well I was doing through the money I made each day. I would monitor my progress and fairly quickly went from small quantities to buying kilos at a time. The gratification, respect from other dealers, and overall progression enthralled me.
Naturally this behaviour didn't end with a world filled with puppies and rainbows but a prison sentence. I was sentenced for selling weed, crack, cocaine, heroin, ketamine, valium and the carrying of an offensive weapon (a kitchen knife and a machete I had traded for seven grams of weed). To be clear it was just the possession of these "bladed articles" that I was convicted of, not their use. Despite investigation they found no evidence they had ever been used as anything more than a self-defensive deterrent. I have many stories of my past life, which I have now, thankfully, left behind entirely. I tend to say I've lived many lifetimes for someone my age; I've seen and been involved in a range of situations from horrific to enthralling. From the age of 14 I was thrust into a world many will never even experience. One of chaos, uncertainty, violence, dominance, threats, big risks but also big rewards. I will leave the stories to other posts as it would take a long time - as one might guess for someone who had been in an extremely large amount of weird, wild and sometimes entirely insane situations. But one that I will tell, the one this post is about is one from my time in prison. Although, I was forced to grow up fast, I hadn't matured. But in prison, I went from boy to man mentally. I discovered a new passion, something I seemed to be made for. A new passion I soon became obsessed with and yearned to become great at - to excel at this too. Unfortunately, I wasn't in the right space to truly get locked-in and grow as in prison I didn't have access to what I would need to actually develop this skill.
One thing led to another and honestly by what can only be called the luckiest series of events I would ever go through. I became a wing cleaner. Then a got a job in recycling where I met two people who would change my life forever. 18 and X (redacting his name as per his wishes). X was our sensei and in his dojo we didn't fight. In-fact it was X who would convince me not to react to certain things when they happened. He taught me a lot in our discussions. Working in recycling had a lot of benefits but none of them came close to the best of them all... The Dojo. The dojo was simply us three discussing what we had read, learned, thought. It was all of this but what made it special was not our enthusiasm or determination to learn. We had an insider. X is someone who not only lives and breathes crypto but had an entire investment company dedicated to it. Meeting X felt like life was giving me another chance and made it almost unfuck-up-able, which for me was important,
It started with some books - the books. To this day I will hand them to every person who comes within a few metres and has a desire to grow. They had such an impact on me that I truly treasure them deeply. Despite having to wait for the wing copy to be available each time I had finished one and yearned for the next, I got through them all and then the true sessions of the 'Dojo' began.
From these books I learned about what money was, how it worked in our world. Something most people don't understand and I certainly didn't. Then slowly I was introduced into the world of blockchain and its potential. I am not a typical crypto-bro people talk about. I think a lot of the space is a scam but I believe in its fundamentals so strongly due to my training in the 'Dojo'.
When I started learning the internals of the EVM and understanding that came from the final book. Then I knew I had found it - the thing I was meant to do, sadly I just had to wait until I was released to do it. But, I had my brother printing out Wikipedia pages of words and concepts I had never heard of. He would send them to me, only for me to ask for even more after reading them and finding something new I did not know of. I learned the inner workings of Bitcoin, UTXOs, the EVM, and Solidity from books and couldn't wait to get behind a computer. The idea of consensus and state, fault-tolerance and distributed vs. decentralised networks. All but consumed me. I didn't realise it at the time but it had opened up a door for me that I had never seen behind before. That door was this peeling back of layers and from the fundamentals recreating these algorithms. I had no computer access so it was all high level stuff we literally spoke aloud to each other while we recycled the prison's cardboard waste. But we would 'rediscover' how to manage state, how to reach consensus, how to prove things actually occurred or not. Invaluable parts of any blockchain, we were discovering for ourselves through discussion, reading and a whole load of questions which would take days for us to find answers to,
X saw something in me and pushed me, he'd have me figure out all these concepts and tackle what were known problems in the space (I had no idea of this at the time). All of these topics were a part of his circle of understanding. However, soon I got deep into the technical nature of it all and X not being a programmer but still someone with excellent technical knowledge began to see where I was headed. The depths of hell I was going to become a developer, it was clear as day. My daily routine was: wake up; workout in my cell; run loops of the tiny concrete yard; shower and go-to work. Once I arrived our sessions in the dojo began and we would talk, rubber-duck each other and try solve problems for hours, then go back to our cells and talking for myself - I'd continue to think on these things until I was next in the dojo. Because it was the COVID years during my time in prison we were on 23-bang up. That's 23 hours in the cell and a single hour out of the cell to go onto the yard, have a shower, and socialise on the wing. I was lucky working where I did as in the afternoons I would go around the wings litter picking - and talking about web3 and its possibilities. Some days we would get an hour in the gym, Friday was Jummah for Muslims, oddly Tuesday was when Christians would goto chapel. But overall, the majority of my time was spent thinking about the potentials of blockchain technology; the way money even works and its flaws and this seemingly semi-mystical world of data-structures, algorithms and code.
X was released before me, so for a while until I was released me and 18 continued our sessions in the Dojo. Due to some prison drama and contraband somehow entering the prison, as they believed through recycling. This didn't last too long. As no-one said a thing, we all lost our jobs, privileges and anything we had earned up to that point benefits wise. 18 had a much longer sentence than I did and soon got shipped out to a different prison but we stayed in touch as did X and I. Who up to this day remains a mentor and friend of mine I hold with so much respect. But despite trying to take it away, the Dojo lived on. I never stopped my brother helping me research, my Nan got involved and probably knows more about crypto than a large number of people. I used to brag my 86-year old Nan understood Ethereum better than me at times, when I would receive her latest bits of research she had undertook. But the time eventually came. After, what felt like forever, I was released. I couldn't physically look back but I can mentally and that prison did more for me than I could ever had imagined.
I loved learning about it all and once I was released and could finally put finger to keyboard, I felt unstoppable. After being released, a new man with drive and determination, and spirit in abundance. I got to learning more and more. Reading the classics from the world of Philosophy; 20th-century classical literature and immersing myself in code. Algorithms, Data Structures, Design Patterns, Cryptography, Distributed and Low-level systems I couldn't get enough. I am still as keen and eager to expand what is possible for me, I am keen to discover the limits of the new lease on life I have been given and then surpass them all the same. I have learned that a life without learning, with no curiosity, at least for me, leads to nothing good. But a curious mind and an eager spirit of determination can take you places you would never have imagined possible. Now I spend a lot of my free time coding different projects including a bootloader, kernel and operating system; an implementation of libc; a chess engine. What I like to do in my personal projects is work on them from scratch using no dependencies whatsoever in the case of the libc implementation (I had to write an operating system for syscalls to have a backend). I believe this adds not just the fun of the project but benefits the programmer in so many different ways. Now we see developers who will instantly install dependencies X, Y and Z when starting a new project without thinking about it and how that affects them and the code they write. Others entirely are simply writing the glue to connect separate libraries. This could be a whole other blog post so I'll leave it there.
Ultimately what I've tried to get across is that in what was arguably one of the darkest moments of my life, I was given a chance and I latched onto it will all I had in me. This chance allowed me to change from being a bad person, someone who sold drugs, someone who took drugs someone with no hope of a future; into a person with so much more potential. Someone driven and determined to learn and build, to do so in a manner that feels pure and from the love of the technology itself. I hope to, in the future, talk to you or whoever ends up reading this about the projects I work on and introduce them in detail when I feel they are ready for external eyes should there be any. Or maybe just some articles on things I find exciting in the tech-world of which I believe to have some opinion worth sharing.
So stay tuned! And until next time,
-- Harry (h5law)