Learning to build during National Service
Two years as a security trooper, and the twelve-hour coding days in between. How constraint turned into the best thing that happened to my engineering.
Everyone talks about National Service like it's two years on pause. For me it was the opposite. It's where I actually became an engineer.
Constraint is a gift
I served as a security trooper. The shifts were long, but the downtime was real, and I made a decision early: every free hour goes into building. Some days that meant twelve hours of coding straight. Not because anyone asked me to, but because I finally had the one thing I'd never had enough of before. Time.
I taught myself web development. Then e-commerce, shipping real storefronts. Then, because it looked like the hardest and most interesting thing on the horizon, blockchain.
Going deep on Supra and Move
I picked Supra, a Move-based chain, and went all the way down. Move is a language built around resources and ownership, and it forces you to think clearly about what can and can't happen to state. Coming from game development, that clicked: it's systems design with the safety turned up.
By the time I came out the other side, I could write and reason about smart contracts. That turned directly into Crystara, the first NFT marketplace on Supra with provably-fair blind-box mints, which went on to win first place at the Supra hackathon and raise a six-figure round.
The real lesson
None of it was assigned. No syllabus, no manager, no deadline. Just the decision to treat spare time as the most valuable thing I owned and to point all of it at getting better.
That's still how I work. Find the frontier, teach yourself what it takes, and ship something real.