Biography
My name is Pezhvak, I was born in 1991 in Tehran, Iran. I lost my father when I was 6 years of old because of cancer. I was raised by my mother who was a teacher.
She was the one who taught me how to hold an soldering iron and how to use it from what she had seen from my father.
As a gift for my 7th birthday she bought me an electronic kit which was a simple circuit of a blinking LED in a form of a cat face. I was so excited and I started to learn how to build circuits.
I got my first computer when I was 8 years old. It was a Pentium 3 with 128 MB of RAM and 20 GB of hard disk space, running Windows 98. Again, my mother was the one who bought it for me and my sister. She wanted us to learn how to use computers, so she hired a tutor to teach us.
It didn't take longer than 8 sessions for me to get a grasp of how to use a computer. The rest was destiny, our neighbor next door was a computer engineer and he taught me how to change the operating system, and how to crack games. My first game ever played on a computer was Project I.G.I
How i got into electronics
After i learned how to use an soldering iron, my habbit was to purchase kits from the local electronic store and build them. I was so excited to see the LED blinking or the buzzer making sound. I was so curious to know how things work. I was always taking things apart to see what's inside.
Sometimes I would take apart my toys, or purchase a few kits and build them together to see what happens.
One time I built a garage door opener for my remote controlled car, and it worked. I was so happy and proud of myself. It was a simple circuit built from a laser pointer and a photoresistor. When the laser beam was broken, the photoresistor would change its resistance and the circuit would trigger the relay to open the garage door. It was so simple yet so effective.
At the same time there was a contest in my school for building a robot. I was so excited and I wanted to participate. I sent my garage thing and I won the prize. The prize was a pen and a chance to speak in front of the whole school. It didn't met my expectations, it seemed they didn't value my work as much as I did.
I wanted to know how microcontrollers work, father of my mother students was a professor in Sharif University of Technology, he was an electrical engineer, my mother got me an appointment with him, so I went to the university and saw the students and campus. It was not what I expected, I thought i would see a lot of robots and electronics, but it was mostly mechanics. Like a robot walking up and down the stairs looking like a trash can.
I was so down and the professor didn't give me anything meaningful. It seemed to me he doesn't know what i was talking about. I was so disappointed and I didn't want to go to school anymore.
My question was simple, how this microcontroller knows what to do? How can i make it do what I want?
I found the answer many years later, it was programming.
How i got into programming
So I wanted to make the microcontroller do what I want, I started to learn programming by myself without even knowing it.
I was 12 years old, and all i had was a computer without internet connection, I had my pack of CDs with me which I brought from Iran.
We lived in Sweden at that time, and I had a lot of free time, I started using an application called MMB, it was used to build autorun for CDs. I had a lot of fun with it, I built a page looking like Windows XP login screen with username and password fields, back then i didn't know what phishing was, I just wanted to see if it works.
I had a lot of fun with it, at school I opened the app and hide somewhere, when someone came to the computer and saw the login screen, they would try to login, and I would see the password.
Well, at least they noticed and called my mother, I thought they will punish me, but they didn't, they just told my mother your child is smart, you should take care of him. I was so happy and proud of myself, there was such a big contrast between how they handled me winning a prize in Iran and how they handled me hacking the school computers in Sweden.
So i continued building things until we came back to Iran. I was 14 years old and had to attend to Tehran International School, I really didn't like school so i would mostly sleep in the class or plan what to do when i get back home. How ever there was a consultant in the school who gave advice to students about their future and what job they can do, when he heard my story he told me you can build AI, robots and such since you already good at electronics and programming. He changed my life! That was all school was good for me.
Acknowledgement
I owe my career, success and life to my mother, she was the one who believed in me and supported me. She was the one who bought me my first computer, my first electronic kit, my first soldering iron, my first everything literally, even my first car, the company I have now, she was the one helped me register it, she helped me to advertise in magazines, my success is because of her, the last true woman in my life, my saviour, my mother.