I Learned to Code in Secret as a Kid to Build Jarvis — Now I'm Doing It at Wispr

When I was a kid, I had to memorize the battery percentage on my mom’s laptop so that I could learn to code.
I’d wait for my parents to go to bed, borrow it, and work on whatever I was building. Before returning it, I’d charge it to the same percentage and put it in exactly the same spot.
My parents gave me 1 hour of screen time per day. So I coded in secret, sleeping every alternate night through middle school and high school.
All for this one obsession: making computers understand us like humans do.
It started with Iron Man. I wanted to build Jarvis, so I taught myself to code through YouTube tutorials. Then came games, music apps, productivity tools. Each project gave me another reason to learn a language or figure out a new platform.
That’s what got me hooked on engineering. You can have an idea, teach yourself what you need, and make something that other people get to use.
I’m still working toward that original idea at Wispr: making computers feel natural to talk to.
18 years later, sitting at a laptop in the middle of the night still takes me back to that kid with a dream to build Jarvis.
At least I can leave the battery at whatever percentage I want now.

As a kid, coding meant sneaking a parent's laptop at night — memorizing the battery percentage and the exact spot it sat in so it could go back looking untouched before morning. With only an hour of sanctioned screen time a day, the workaround was staying up secretly through middle and high school, alternating sleepless nights to keep building.

The spark was Iron Man — wanting to build Jarvis pulled the author into YouTube tutorials, then games, music apps, and productivity tools, each one a reason to pick up a new language or platform. That pattern — having an idea, teaching yourself what you need, and shipping something others can use — became the hook that led to a career in engineering.

Eighteen years later, that original goal is still the throughline: at Wispr, the work is making computers feel natural to talk to. Wispr is a real, venture-backed company (founded 2021) building voice-first interfaces — most visibly through Wispr Flow, its AI dictation product — with a stated long-term goal of building a voice-native computing system.