From dark web drug dealer, to Senior Software Engineer
“Hindsight must surely be the most useless function of the human brain, torturing yourself over the unalterable past.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Mindstar Rising
My name is Ryan Roberts. I’m 26 years old, originally from Long Beach, California, and for the last 5 years, I have been living in Tel Aviv, Israel working as software engineer. At least, I was working full time— until just 2 weeks ago, where I left my most recent position at an early stage startup in the AI industry. I left the team on good terms, I’m just simply taking a short break 🧘♂️.
I never really shared my full story with anyone on how I got to where I am, so I’m using this time to do so. Who knows, maybe one person reading this might find this story interesting or entertaining.
Forewarning— this is kind of a long one.
The origin
Growing up in Southern California, I had a relatively good childhood growing up. Nothing went horribly wrong, and from an outside observer looking in, I had an ideal childhood.
Playing with LEGO, going on camping trips, ski vacations with the family, playing RuneScape, having good friends— all of the experiences I had in my youth fill me with endless love and joy when I look back on them.
Okay, lets get real
While my life seemed to be all happy and normal from the outside, for the longest time I can remember, I have always felt extremely detached and disassociated. Feeling extremely disconnected from myself, from reality, and from others.
I have vivid memories of me at 4 years old, sitting in pre-school, having intense feelings of derealization and depersonalization (words I would not learn until much later). I was feeling absolutely spaced out, and was fully convinced that everything around me was not real.
Imagine the feeling of day-dreaming and losing focus on what you’re doing. Now multiply the intensity of this by 1000%, and make it endless. It’s the feeling as if you are observing your life through a lens, or a TV screen. You can see everything that’s happening in front of you, but none of it feels real. You are viewing everything from a pulled-back point of view, where everything feels alien and dreamlike, and you’re never able to truly snap out of it.
I thought these feelings were totally normal, and I don’t think my infant brain could even comprehend what was supposed to feel “normal” or not.
These feelings of detachment only worsened as time went on, and by the time I turned 9, my performance in school started to drop dramatically.
From once being a top performer in my elementary school, I was soon struggling to keep up with even the most basic of subjects. My mind was slipping, and I was spiraling downhill fast.
In school, more than wanting to have good grades— more than anything, all I wanted was to be liked by others. To fit in, to feel loved, and to feel accepted.
The thing is, is that I have always had all these things, and I can’t tell you where this deep feeling of insecurity and unrest originated from. I can only tell you that it got so much worse as time went on.
I drifted through middle-school, spending most of my free time playing video games (the 2011-2014 era for gaming was just the best, you had to be there). I’m talking: Skyrim, Halo Reach, Far Cry 3, Red Dead Redemption, Black Ops Zombies— I was a proper gamer. I even had my own Minecraft server in 2011, back when the game was still in version alpha.
Enter high-school, and my poor grades and low performance continued to decline even further than they already were. When I was 15, I entered my first serious relationship, and I got heavily involved with drugs. Weed was very commonplace in my school, but I decided to take things one step further and abuse benzodiazepines, prescription opiates, lean, Adderall, cocaine, ketamine, and more than anything—psychedelics.
I had all the paraphernalia for smoking weed. Bongs, pipes, bubblers, rolling papers, blunt wraps, you name it. I centered my whole personality around smoking weed and doing drugs, and I made it clear to everyone that this was my identity: being a stoner.
There are many crazy stories I can share about my drug experiences in my youth, probably enough to fill up a few 5+ hour Joe Rogan podcasts, but for now, I’ll talk about the time I discovered the dark web.
Buying drugs off the dark web
When I was 16, I became really fascinated with DMT. At the time, I was reading lots of Alan Watts and Terrence McKenna. I read The Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman and the Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. I listened to Joe Rogan, and enjoyed paintings from Alex Grey. Long story short— I started to develop a deep fascination with this chemical.
I was determined to get my hands on this drug, no matter what. The problem— was that I did not know any dealers in my area who were selling it, and most people I spoke with didn’t even know what it was. I soon discovered the dark web, and learned that there are online marketplaces for buying and selling drugs.
I knew this was my best shot for obtaining DMT.
I read a few horror stories about the dark web, about there being things like Red Rooms (rooms where people pay to have innocent victims tortured on a livestream). I heard about being able to hire hitmen, buying guns, CP rings, and everything in-between.
To say that I was nervous for what I might see upon entering the dark web would be an understatement.
I was still determined to buy DMT though— My main concern was about how I would get the drugs delivered to me. I did not want to get anything sent to my house, for fear of having the SWAT team show up to my door with a battering ram. I also tried to convince some of my friends to allow me to send it to their place, but no one agreed.
My only option at this point, and what was most recommended in the online forms I was reading, was to purchase a P.O. box under a fake name, so I went to the local PO box office next to my high school and did just that. I paid in cash (decided to give them my real name), and in moments— I secured a private mailbox for myself for just $20 a month.
The lady working at the PO box office counter was asking me “Don’t you need to be 18 to get a PO box?”, but the manager watching over her thankfully said no.
I had a backstory prepared in case someone asked why I was purchasing the PO box— I would say that I’m a popular YouTuber, and that fans always want to send me mail. It also wouldn’t be a total lie, because at the time, I had one Minecraft video from 2010 uploaded on my channel which amassed a whopping 313 views and counting.
Fortunately, no one asked.
So great! I had the drug delivery location secured. Now, I just needed to get the currency.
The thing about dark market, is that you cannot pay in a normal currency. You cannot use PayPal, Venmo, or CashApp— You have to use a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin. Keep in mind that this was in 2016, long before Bitcoin became the commodity that it is today, so buying it back then was much more difficult.
I found a website called LocalBitcoins, where you could essentially find and contact a local Bitcoin ‘dealer’, and meet them to pay cash in exchange for Bitcoin.
So that’s exactly what I did. I found and contacted a few of the highest rated Bitcoin dealers in my area, and moments later, one wrote back to me saying he can sell me bitcoin— he just requires a $200 minimum purchase.
I agreed, and planned to buy $400 worth of bitcoin from him.
At the time, I assumed that bitcoin was only used for buying drugs and doing illegal shit, so I was skeptical about meeting this guy in public. He did not have any profile picture, and the only thing I had to go off of was his Arabic sounding profile name, which was something like @AhkmedAbjul2918.
The dealer and I agreed to meet in a local Starbucks at 2:00pm on the following Thursday. I made sure to have a friend come with me for the deal, to have an extra set of muscle in case things went south.
Thursday arrives, and I’m sitting inside of the Starbucks cafe. My friend was too scared to come with me, so I’m sitting all alone at a table, waiting for the dealer to arrive. I arrive a few minutes early, and order myself a vanilla Frappuccino and a chocolate croissant to make things look less suspicious.
My clocks reads 1:50pm, and my eyes are pacing the cafe for who the potential dealer might be.
I don’t see any obvious suspects, just families and kids enjoying their afternoons drinking coffee.
A few moments pass by, and nothing.
I look at my phone again, and it’s 2:00pm now.
It feels like I’m in the episode of Breaking Bad where Walter White is sitting in Los Pollos Hermanos, waiting to meet Gus (the largest meth kingpin in New Mexico), and he doesn’t know exactly what he looks like, or what to look for.
Seconds pass, and I see what appears to be a white Rolls Royce pull up to the Starbucks parking lot.
The driver’s door opens slowly, and I catch a glimpse of red Nike Yeezy sneakers step out on to the pavement. A young, 20-something year old, clean and fit looking guy steps out of the car, wearing designer fashion from head-to-toe. I’m talking: Gucci T-shirt, Prada sunglasses, Comme des Garçons jeans, Fendi belt, with a gold Rolex. It was evident that this guy had money— but it wasn’t overtly obnoxious or flashy.
I knew this had to be my guy.
He enters the cafe, and I grab his attention by giving him a subtle head-nod. He returns a head-nod back to me, and walks towards my table.
The deal is on. There’s no backing out now.
He sits down across from me, and without any formal greeting, he asks me to show him the money.
I take out the $400 I brought with me, all crumpled up and in various denominations, and give it to him, trying my best to stay calm and collected.
He counts it slowly, and makes sure it’s all there.
After counting the money once, he pauses, makes eye contact with me, then proceeds to count it again, only this time— slower.
Seconds go by which feels like an eternity. He finishes counting the money, and asks me to take out my phone to show him my bitcoin wallet QR code.
I show it to him, and he takes out his phone to scan my QR code.
In seconds, I see a notification pop up on my phone saying: "xx just sent you 0.94 Bitcoin!”. He kept a small fee for his service, but it was all fair in the end.
We shake hands, and he walks outside to return to his Rolls Royce, and drives off.
At that moment, sitting alone in that Starbucks cafe in 2016— I just received $400 worth of Bitcoin to my name.
For those who don’t know, 1 Bitcoin in 2016 was worth around $400. Today, it’s worth over $97,500. If I would have kept a small amount of that Bitcoin instead of spending it all on illicit substances— let’s just say things would be very different now.
Anyways, now I had the Bitcoin, had the PO box— it was finally time for me to enter the dark market.
In order to enter the dark web, you can’t just use any ordinary web browser like Google Chrome or Safari. Instead, you need to download a separate web browser called TOR (or The Onion Router). It’s a web browser that re-routes your internet traffic through multiple “relays” and layers of encryption, making it virtually impossible to trace where a request originates from.
Think of it like having a VPN on steroids.
With Tor, you can access any website as you normally would in Chrome (some people actually do this just to be more anonymous when browsing the web), but the main difference is that Tor allows you to access websites with the .onion extension.
Websites with the .onion extension can only be visited using Tor, and it’s where all the dark markets and sketchy sites are hosted. Onion sites also use deliberately obfuscated addresses, meaning their URLs look like a random strings of characters, i.e. www.f0238vhnals9320.onion
I discovered links to all of the most popular .onion dark market sites pretty quickly through public Reddit forums. This was around 2016-2017, where major markets like SilkRoad were taken down, however, new alternatives were popping up every day, like AlphaBay and Dream Market.
I decided to go with AlphaBay, as it was the highest rated market on Reddit at the time. I copied the AlphaBay .onion link from Reddit, opened up Tor, pasted the URL, and waited for the page to load.
The page is taking a few seconds to load, and in the seconds it takes to load, I think to myself—am I about to see all the horror stories I read about?
Is the FBI about to break down my door, seize my computer, and take me straight to prison?
I made sure to take any extra security precautions I could— like putting tape over my webcam, using an extra VPN, and closing all other apps. Not that any of these things actually improved my anonymity, I just wanted to give myself the peace of mind that I was untraced.
The dark market loads, and I enter— and by my surprise, I didn’t see anything too extreme. There were no red rooms, no hitmen, no children for sale. It was mainly just drugs (and I mean LOTS of drugs), along with hacked Spotify and Netflix accounts, and counterfeit money.
Surprisingly, the most common thing I saw listed on AlphaBay was stolen credit card information. For just $8.00, you could purchase a random person’s credit card information, with the expiration date and three-digit CVV. I thought to myself: “maybe this is why my credit card company always alerts me about suspicious activity in random parts of the world!”
After scrolling past seemingly endless listings of drugs: cocaine, ketamine, fentanyl, liquid alprazolam, mushrooms, steroids, MDMA— I finally found what I was looking for. I found a high rated DMT vendor who went by the name of “Dream Sand”.
The dark market works similar to eBay, insofar as that buyers can leave ratings and reviews about the sellers. Dream Sand had hundreds of 5 star ratings, with many reviews claiming his product was excellent, and that he provided great “stealth” packaging— whatever that meant.
Before making the order however, I had to learn how to properly communicate with the dealers.
The thing about contacting drug dealers on the dark market, is that you cannot simply write messages in plain text. If you do, no one will respond to you. Instead, you have to encrypt your messages with PGP— an encryption algorithm where only the person you’re sending the message to can decrypt and read the message contents. Each seller has their own public ‘encryption key’ that you have use to encrypt your message with, and you then have to ‘sign’ your message with your own private key.
I even had a keyboard macro that automated the entire process. I could highlight the text I wanted to send, press Command + Alt + Shift + 3, paste the seller’s public key into a popup window, and instantly receive a PGP-encrypted version of the message.
I was basically a senior cyber-security engineer at 16 years old with all the shit I had to learn.
When I was ready to place the order, I sent the payment to Dream Sand, around 0.02 bitcoin for 5 grams of DMT, and followed up with an encrypted message containing my PO box details. Afterwards, I started checking my PO box every day after school to see if anything had arrived.
1 week passes, nothing.
2 weeks pass— still nothing.
I’m starting to assume I got scammed, which is a very common thing to happen on the dark market— until one day, I see an envelope appear in my PO box.
Holy shit I thought to myself, and my heart immediately drops.
I check twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, and I open the PO box to confirm that yes, there is in fact a letter there.
I glance at the counter to see if anyone is watching me, and look outside the window to see if police cars are waiting to arrest me on the spot.
I carefully take out the letter, and see it’s from “Morton’s Salt Company”, addressed to me. I place the letter in my backpack, and walk out of the PO box office trying my best to not to draw any suspicion. I arrive home, made sure I was in complete privacy, and took the letter out of my backpack.
I locked my door, checked outside my window to make sure I wasn’t being watched, and closed my blinds to the point where I was in complete darkness.
I took a deep breath— and opened the letter.
Inside, was a formal letter saying something along the lines of “Thank you for being a dedicated customer of Morton’s Salt! We offer you to try a sample of a new salt formula we have been working on!”. At the bottom, was a signature from a salesperson of Morton’s Salt, with a physical ink signature and everything.
At the very bottom of the letter, I noticed a small bag of white ‘salt’ stapled to the paper. Now I understood why all the 5-star reviews were complimenting the stealth.
A few days later, I set up a whole day for myself to smoke this mystery powder.
In short— I transcended dimensions, and had the ‘breakthrough’ experience that Terrence McKenna talked about in great length
I met entities in the DMT spirit realm— one of which being a lizard creature who blew smoke into my face, and the next being a large overweight black lady who resembled a Thai Buddha, who passed lifetimes of love and wisdom to my consciousness.
I am not as involved in the psychedelic space as I once was, but to be honest, it was pretty fascinating to have had such a similar experience to the hundreds of other experiences that I read about prior.
There are paintings from Alex Grey that—to this day— trigger full blown flashbacks for me when I look at them, just for how accurately he depicts the DMT experience.
In the end, I ended up buying from the vendor a dozen more times, as well as other drugs. I started buying other items from the dark web— counterfeit money, ketamine, MDMA (which never arrived), and a hacked Spotify account.
I continued buying bitcoin from the same dealer, and started to tell other people at my school about this, even convincing some of the drug dealers in my area to start getting their supply from the dark web, teaching them about Bitcoin, PGP, and Tor.
Enough about dark web talk for now, let’s get back to where we were.
Back to the main story
So basically from the ages of 15-17, I was constantly under the influence, and never went more than 2 days without altering my brain on something. While most kids around me were concerned about which college they were getting in to, my mind was focused on what specific combination of drugs I could take in order to help me unlock new doors of perception in my brain.
There was never anyone particular that played a bad influence on me— the reality was that I was the bad influence. Parents did not want me to be around their kids. Childhood friends I grew up with no longer wanted to see me. All I wanted to do usually involved doing something illegal, and I made it very apparent with my image and persona that I was a reckless and drug-fueled kid.
I was constantly getting in trouble at school. I was on a first-name basis with my school’s police officer, and got suspended multiple times for drug-related charges. I even got sent to a ‘Scared Straight’ program for getting arrested for smoking weed outside my school’s campus. When I got arrested, I had a few ounces of weed in my backpack, various smoking apparatuses, a gram scale, small dime-bags, a quarter-pint of lean, and various pills I could not tell you the names of—enough to be get at least 10 charges placed on me combined with a hefty prison sentence. Thankfully, due to me being so young and being a first-time offender, I was offered to do the Scared Straight program, and go on probation instead of serving any real prison time.
For those who don’t know, Scared Straight is a program in the US where troubled youth enter a real courtroom trial with a judge, wear orange prison jumpsuits, and get taken to a jailhouse to meet real inmates— in hopes of getting ‘scared straight’ and never making the same mistake again.
During the courtroom hearing, you are required to swear to the judge and to your family to never make the same mistakes again, and you have swear with such conviction, such that if the judge senses you not being serious, you will not get released.
In my case, just minutes after I got released from the program and swore to everyone that I would never make the same mistake again— I immediately went home and crushed up and snorted 2 alprazolam pills, and chased them down with a few massive bong rips.
I was extremely self-destructive, and would constantly destroy the trust and friendship with everyone around me and anyone that came close to me. I was on a violent downward spiral, and my drug use only kept increasing.
I have always had strong passions for music, art, and life, but I always defaulted to centering my whole personality around being a self-destructive and habitual drug user.
Okay, enough with the trauma dump.
Very shortly after me completing high school (I don’t think I ever received a certificate of completion, as I was failing most of my classes), it’s the summer of 2017, and in classic Ryan Roberts fashion, I convinced some friends of mine to do a very high dose of LSD at Dana Point beach—an affluent beach town about a 40-minute drive south of my hometown. I brought with me a vial of liquid LSD that I purchased from a random hippie, and inside it contained around 50 drops of LSD, each drop containing about 100 micrograms (according to the dealer).
To give you some context, 70 micrograms of LSD is all you need to produce profound hallucinations and psychedelic effects. Anything more than 200, and you’re asking to be fully impaired for at least 24 hours. 400+ micrograms, and you’re risking permanent irreversible brain-damage, and it’s strongly suggested from even from the most experienced users to never take this much.
I was about to do 700 micrograms.
I brought with me a bag of Sour Patch Kids gummies, a soft candy perfect for applying the liquid LSD on. I carefully administered 7 drops of the LSD on a single sour patch kid until it began dripping.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, said a small prayer to myself, and ate it.
…
The trip itself lasted for around 24 hours, and consisted of full blown hallucinations, and my entire field of view was engulfed in kaleidoscopic patterns. If you have ever seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas— I was essentially Johnny Depp’s character for 24 hours, walking around public making it very very obvious to every passerby that I was under the influence. To this day, I am genuinely surprised that no police officers or ambulances were called to check on me.
The friends I came with also did the drug, but in much smaller amounts. None of us were in a stable condition to drive at the end of the day, so we essentially chose to be homeless for the night. I did not want to sleep in their car, and my mind was too stimulated to think about sleeping—so by the end of the night, I found a tree to lay under, and talked and laughed to myself until the sun rose.
When the sun came up and the peak effects of the drug wore off, our designated driver returned us all home safe and sound.
Moments after the trip ended, and after the majority of chemical effects left my system, the priorities in my life started to shift.
It could have been the LSD, or just me being on the verge of 18 years old and fresh out of high school— but after the trip, I immediately realized that spending all of my time smoking weed and doing drugs was not the most ideal way to spend my time. Drugs no longer appealed to me. At that point, my attention was fully centered around the things I’d always been passionate about—music, working out, and eating clean—and I was determined to stay committed to them.
The Programming Journey begins— sort of?
It’s September of 2018, and I’m 19. I’m working at a supermarket making minimum wage, bagging groceries for old ladies and collecting shopping carts in the 95°F Southern Californian heat.
There is kind of an unspoken rule in my parent’s house: either go to college and study something, or leave. No questions asked.
Since I did not have enough money to move out (as much as I would have wanted to), I enrolled at my local community college.
I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to study, so I started taking any and all random classes under the sun— from Music Theory, to Philosophy, from English Literature, to Health & Nutrition. The idea of me taking all these random courses at college really frustrated me, simply because I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to major in.
I always thought it was better to pursue a degree if you knew what you wanted to directly apply the degree for after receiving it, rather than just taking random classes because your parents are forcing you to.
I attempted to apply for government financial aid, but after countless hours of making no progress—the application was a 200+ page online questionnaire—I eventually gave up. I remember the tuition costing around $800 per semester, and this was not including any of the required textbooks.
My parents offered to help me cover the expenses, but I didn’t feel comfortable continuing to ask my parents to help, so after my first few semesters, I began paying for my classes out of my own pocket
I really aspired to be financially independent, and to never ask for financial help unless I absolutely had to. In my mind, thinking about all the trauma I inflicted on my family— the least I could do on my end was to pay for my studies.
My conflict about college still persisted however— and I could not understand why I had to to attend college without a clear major in mind. I always thought it would be more wise and beneficial with my time to simply continue working, saving up money, and only enrolling in college after I had a definitive major in mind. Unfortunately, there was never a middle-ground I was able to reach.
There was no room for discussion— and the requirement for me living at home was simply to be full-time student.
So I continued to stay enrolled, and continued taking random classes for about a year and a half, until I started to really hone in on what I wanted to spend all of my time doing.
One day, I came across a few clickbait YouTube videos titled things like ‘Day in the Life of a Software Engineer working at AirBnB!’. I did not know anything about software development at the time— only that writing code made up a large portion of the job. A lot of these videos seemed pretty appealing. Eating free food all day, cozy offices, listening to music, relaxed dress code, absurdly high salaries, stable job security— What’s there not to like?
Without knowing anything about the profession, I kind of made up the 2-second decision in my head that this was the career path I wanted to pursue.
After all, I started a Minecraft server when I was 11, knew my way around the dark web, and had a general fluency with computers, so surely coding shouldn’t be that hard, right?
My community college, Long Beach City College, offered a 2-year program for getting an ‘Associates Degree’ in Computer Science. It’s a 2-year degree that can be transferred over to any university, such that if I wanted to, I could finish the remaining required units and receive a traditional 4-year Bachelor’s degree.
The required coursework for the associate’s degree included subjects like:
Calculus 1 & 2
Mechanical Physics
Object Oriented Programming in Java
Computer Architecture
Keep in mind, I completed high school with maybe a 1.75 GPA (~55% for all the non-Americans), and the idea of me taking Calculus just seemed to be out of the realm of possibilities for me.
I did not get too discouraged about it though; I just kind of viewed these required courses as what I had to do in order to move ahead in life.
So that’s what I did.
For the next year or so, on top of working full time as a professional grocery-bagger, I started going hard on computer science.
I would spend all my free time getting myself caught up with the math I neglected in high-school, using the website Kahn Academy (amazing platform), and just immersing myself and manifesting the idea that I will become a programmer— no matter what.
Throughout the whole time of me going down the traditional path of getting a formal computer science degree, I could not help but shake the idea that college seemed like an absolute waste of time.
My end goal was simply to become an employable software engineer, and the concept of taking classes like history, geography (these were required electives to receive the degree), and calculus and physics (as important as they are), did not seem at all like practical nor actionable steps towards reaching my end goal.
I have always valued education, I just did not see the value in paying for a degree and learning outdated theoretical coursework that had little-to-no practical applications.
These negative thoughts I had towards college would soon grow even stronger— but in the meantime, I just kept my head down and continued to grind, ultimately trying my best to satisfy my parents dreams of me being a good student and doing something productive with my life.
We’re almost done with the college part
My first exposure to real programming was an Object Oriented Programming in Java course I took.
It was an absolutely miserable experience, and the teacher was very apathetic, blazing through random Java code snippets without providing us with any practical use cases.
Our final capstone project was to a build a tic-tac-toe game that ran in the CLI. I managed to slop together a few hundred if-statements inside a single file, and in the end— I managed to have something playable.
At the end of the course, I started to become very discouraged with continuing the traditional path of getting a CS degree; mainly for how un-practical and outdated everything I was learning felt to me.
The straw that broke the camels back was the next CS class I took: CS15 - Computer Architecture.
I’m not even joking when I say that our professor (Mr. Zho I think his name was), barely spoke any English, and wrote with the most unreadable handwriting on a chalkboard, explaining how assembly language and compilers work, in a class with 70+ students. I remember sitting in class thinking to myself “What in the actual fuck am I doing here?”
It wasn’t just me also. Everyone around me had 0 clue as to what the teacher was saying. I was asking other people what they thought about it, and everyone just remained acquiescent in their processes of continuing their degrees. Being in this class amongst everyone was the ultimate NPC moment.
F**k college. Time to do my own thing 😤
A few months into my CS track, I watched a YouTube video titled “The FASTEST way to become a software developer”. It was from a YouTuber named Aaron Jack. There are probably at least 100 videos with the same title that get uploaded every single day, but Aaron (who was a frontend developer at Uber) seemed to have solid advice. He also came from a non-traditional background (i.e. no college degree), and I really resonated with what he had to say.
His advice was pretty straightforward: Learn frontend web development, and get really good at it.
His outline was more-or-less the following:
1. Spend a few months learning HTML + CSS - enough to get to a point where you can recreate any website, pixel-perfect, with just HTML + CSS
2. Learn JavaScript, and add a few JavaScript interactive elements to your websites.
3. Go all in on React.
4. Build lots of projects with React.
5. Start applying to jobs.
Without knowing much, I said to myself: “I’m going to follow this guy’s advice”. I even left a comment on the youtube video at the time of stating my progress, saying something like I’m gonna follow this guy’s advice and hopefully in one year from now— I’ll land a software developer job.
And without making this up, literally one year from the time I left that comment, I got my first job offer as a full stack engineer!
Before we get to that point though— while I was still taking courses at the college, spending my hours listening to Mr. Zho give lectures in Chinese, I started to follow Aaron Jack’s advice, and I started taking taking Udemy courses on web development.
One of the first courses that I really gained a lot from, was a course I took on advanced CSS and SCSS, from an instructor named Jonas Schmedtmann. It was phenomenal, and was the first time where things really started to click for me.
The course was essentially 40+ hours of hand writing CSS (every developer’s dream - I know), ultimately creating some pretty breathtaking websites, even by today’s standards. I even had my old portfolio website based off one of the websites I built in the course, see it here
I think one of the main reasons why this course clicked for me, was just how practical everything was.
Even though we were just writing rudimentary stylesheets, the instant feedback and visible artwork the computer was producing after each line code really spawned the beginning of my career as a programmer.
I thought to myself, I’m going to finish this stupid CS Associates Degree (just for my family’s sake), and enroll in a coding bootcamp afterwards, and just go full time in trying to get a job.
At the end of it all, I only had to complete a few more courses in order to get the associate’s degree, so it seemed like this plan could actually become a reality.
I even told a few of my classmates about my plan, and everyone looked at me as if I was an alien visiting from a different dimension.
“What do you mean you’re not going to a university get a 4 year degree??”- was the most common response I got. The idea of me taking this slightly alternative route did not seem to compute with anyone in my classes. Everyone was determined to get slammed with student loan debt and to continue their dinosaur approach for learning CS, as if their life depended on it.
With all love though, I hope all of my previous classmates have all landed very fulfilling careers, and are doing exactly what they want in life today.
For me, I just simply could not follow the pack.
Entering Monk Mode
Shortly after COVID-19 hit, there reached a point in my life that I like to call my ‘monk’ era.
Without getting too deep, in the winter of 2020, I became massively depressed and detached (even more so than I already am), with the most intense feelings of derealization and depersonalization I have ever felt.
It was so bad to the point where most days, I would hear full-blown auditory hallucinations (usually hearing things like a train passing in the distance), and everything around me would appear hyper-real and HD, and extremely distorted. Sounds would bounce from every direction, and things far in the distance would sound like they are coming from right behind me. I felt like I belonged in a psychiatric institution with padded walls. Sometimes, these dysphoric effects would last minutes, other times days, weeks, even months, without any trigger or release.
The thing about depersonalization, is that it never fully fades away. It is always there, just sometimes it’s more intense, and sometimes it’s less intense.
Whenever I would be going through a a heavy psychotic derealization episode, most people would come up to me and say: “Is everything okay? You look very tired”. I always tried my best to keep a poker-face when going through the worst mental episodes, and tried to not make it seem blatantly obvious that I was losing my mind.
Without having really much friends or a social life, I tried my best to channel my inner mental chaos into moving myself forward.
This involved waking up at 5-am, taking cold showers, listening to David Goggins and Jocko Willink religiously, working out for 2+ hours a day, taking CS classes at my community college, reading challenging books, working late hours at the grocery store, and coming home every night to grind on web development.
This was my daily routine for almost 6 months. At the time, I was also strictly living a straight-edge vegan lifestyle, which for me involved no caffeine, no drugs, no alcohol, and cooking whole food plant based meals everyday.
I basically lived off of whole brown rice, beans, frozen vegetables from Costco, oatmeal, peanut butter, bananas, and brazil nuts.
The only processed foods I would eat would be bread (and I would always opt for the most whole grain Ezekiel bread), and on a rare occasions, cereals like Kashi GO-lean cereal.
Occasionally, I would treat myself to a vegan mock-meat alternative product from brands like Gardein, or a dairy-free ice cream, but that was mostly empty calories for me, and I would only eat them once I reached my macronutrient goals for the day.
I was so locked in with my bodybuilding routine, to the point where I increased my bodyweight from 155lbs (70kg) to 175lbs (80kg) in less than 2 months, staying lean. I basically put on 20lbs of muscle mass from eating straight brown rice.
With the amount of rice and vegetables I was eating, I was literally consuming food for almost 4 hours a day, eating 6-7 large meals a day. It was kind of torturous, I’m not going to lie.
I have since changed my workout routine to focus more on calisthenics, but at the time, I was deeply invested in the bodybuilding and weightlifting world.
Aside from eating 24/7— an average day consisted of me:
Waking up at 5 a.m., taking a cold shower, and having deep uninterrupted work, usually working through a programming book.
Going to college from 7:00-11:00 (I made sure to enroll in all the earliest classes possible, to still be allow me to go to work after).
Working at the supermarket. (My shifts were usually 12-7pm, 1pm-8pm, and my least favorite: 3pm-12am)
Going to the gym after work, and lifting weights with high intensity for at least an hour.
Arriving home, doing homework, and grinding on programming / Udemy courses.
This routine gave me purpose. It gave me fuel. Throughout all of the darkness my head was fighting through, I had to stay focused on my mission.
As I was continuing my grind, one day my sister told me about a program about a full stack coding bootcamp in Tel Aviv, Israel.
It was part of an organization called MASA— an organization allowing anyone from around the world, Jewish and non-Jewish, to come and study or do various programs in Israel.
I have never been to Israel before, and I had no prior connections to the land, but hearing about it sounded like a cool thing to do. I desperately wanted to leave my hometown, and to also advance in my path towards becoming an employable software engineer, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me.
Without much hesitation, I applied.
Moving to Israel! ✈️ 🇮🇱
I applied to the coding bootcamp and got accepted, after passing a surprisingly difficult live-coding interview, requiring me to connect a Google Maps API to an existing web app.
I packed my suitcase, purchased my flight ticket, and prepared for the 18 hour journey.
The only Hebrew word I knew at the time was שלום (Shalom), and I genuinely had no idea what there was in the land of Israel.
I just assumed that there were people riding camels everywhere, and that the country was in an active warzone. Only the latter proved to be true.
After arriving in Israel, the whole country was in a lockdown (this is still peak COVID). The MASA program helped find living accommodations, and found a hostel that was doing month-to-month subletting. When I arrived, I stayed in a shared room with a guy from Chile, named David, who was also in the bootcamp but in a different class, focused on data science and machine learning.
The sublet was around $800 a month, and I had impressively saved up around $7,000 from my last 3 years of working almost full-time at the supermarket. I did some simple math, and calculated how long I could continue living in Tel Aviv without working, and estimated I had around 6 months of comfortable living before my expenses would start to run out.
There were maybe 13 other international students that were in this MASA program with me, all from around the world. In the end— As much as I tried, I really was not able to connect with most of the kids in this program. Most of the kids were very religious, coming from very different backgrounds as me, and in all serious, were just kind of lame.
I’m grateful that I kept in touch with at least one person there, a guy from Belgium named Alex. He returned to Belgium a few months after the program ended, and we’ve been keeping in touch ever since, and have even met up in Europe to travel before.
I also became close friends with a Columbian guy named Ariel, who was on an entirely different program as me and living in a different area— we just happened to meet serendipitously. We ended up living together as flatmates for a few years after our Masa programs ended.
The coding bootcamp was almost entirely remote due to Covid, and it occupied the majority of my first 3 months of living in Israel. Living with the Chilean, David, entering Zoom lectures everyday, and coding.
The hostel I was staying at was also a unique experience, as many Israelis came to live there during Covid, simply to meet and connect with other people during this isolating time. There were many parties on the hostel rooftop, and I even joined a workout group with some of the other guests living there during the lock-down.
The bootcamp and MASA program were both extremely poorly organized, but at the end of it all, I gained value just due to the large amount of projects I built.
The bootcamp was basically structured like this:
A really shitty lecture on Zoom about some web development topic
A take-home assignment to implement what the lecturer taught about.
It was mostly self-learning, which in all honesty is the best way for anyone to learn software development. In the end of the program, I built around 10-15 full stack web apps, touching all parts of the modern web stack (the MERN stack was all the hype at the time, and that was the main focus in the bootcamp).
I did not learn a ton of new things in the course, credit to the hundreds of hours I spent before studying on my own, but ultimately, it was a good experience being forced to build projects for 3 months straight.
Also, the excitement of living in a new country, combined with living on my own at 21 motivated me to take things more seriously.
Shortly after finishing the course, I got referred from the instructors to join a pre-seed data science startup, called Deltika. They were scouting for a developer to help them build a one-off project in the Fiverr / Upwork freelancing industry.
I accepted and joined them, grateful to have any professional experience under my belt, and ended up building a dashboard for Fiverr freelancers to get analytics about their profile, such as their overall rating, and competition.
Not to flex— but at the time, and given my little experience, I created a pretty impressive product for them, using some pretty modern tech at the time. I’m talking about:
React (bootstrapped with create-react-app, don’t laugh)
Styled Components
Web Scraping with Python BS4, Selenium, and a rotating mobile proxy service to avoid getting blocked from Fiverr
AWS Lambda with Python (Flask), deployed with Chalice (A CLI tool for deploying python lamdba endpoints)
AWS Amplify for hosting.
After the contract ended, the company was not able to hire me full time, but they said I did a great job, and would happily recommend me in the future.
I was at a crossroads— to stay in Israel, or return to the US?
I said to myself, fuck it. I’m already here— let me try to apply for a proper full stack engineer role and see what happens.
Luckily at the time, (Covid 2021), the tech industry was booming, and Tel Aviv was a hot city for new tech startups. Every day, I saw at least 50 new job postings for software developer jobs pop up on LinkedIn.
I started spam applying on LinkedIn to every job posting in Tel Aviv that had the words “Software” and “Developer” in it. If it said I needed 10, 20, or 30 years of experience, I was applying.
I was fully determined to break in to the tech industry.
Every job application I would send resulted in a rejection. I had so many rejections to the point where it felt like second-nature to me. I probably ended up applying for over 1000 jobs in the end.
I had so many interviews that would begin well, but once the interviewer would discover that I have not worked in a professional environment for more than a few years, they would immediately hang up on me.
Since my only relevant work experience at the time was building a project for Deltika for 2 months, and this coding bootcamp (which actually usually looks bad to have on a resume— as the majority of bootcamp grads are not competent engineers), I really had to change my strategy for getting my first dev job.
I did not give up though, and I was committed to getting hired. I would constantly attend tech meetups in my city, and would start every conversation with something along the lines of “Hi I’m Ryan, I’m a software engineer and I would love to work for you”.
After countless rejections, I finally landed a very great engineering job at an E-commerce startup called CityHive, where I worked my ass off for almost 3 years with no breaks, and ended up making a 25,000 NIS/ month salary by the time I finished working there.
So in the span of just 1 year, I went from depressed, minimum wage grocery-bagger in my hometown, to living in a foreign country working as a software engineer making an incredibly high salary.
Where we are today
Since then, I have worked at various startups ranging in all sizes, have built countless side projects, gave lectures to engineering teams across many subjects, and have grown so much in my professional life.
After working in the industry for almost 6 years now, I feel like my journey is only just beginning, and there is still so much more to accomplish.
My main focus recently has been learning ML and AI, and I have been very enthusiastic about the company Modal— an AI inference company that I’ve been using for a personal project.
I don’t have much more to add right now, but if you made it this far— I hope this was an enjoyable read, and that it was somewhat entertaining.
There is so much more that happened in between, from me being forced to draft to the IDF, to starting a few bands in in the Israeli hardcore music scene— Maybe I’ll make a part 2.
But until then,
Thanks so much for reading,
Love,
Ryan
Happy to be a part of your story, my friend. Very cool to get to know
more of your past