Rebuilding Cryptography From Scratch - My Complete Learning Journey (All Parts Inside)

This collection brings together all my deep-dive explorations into cryptography

Dec 01, 2025

Why this project exists - and why it might matter to you

I picked up a guitar at fifteen because I wanted to play Metallica and Lamb of God. I hunted down tabs, copied riffs, and tried to brute-force my way into sounding like my heroes. It didn’t work. Months passed, and I still couldn’t play anything properly.

A friend told me to stop chasing songs and start practicing scales and exercises. I hated that idea. “I want to play real music, not this boring stuff.” But eventually, frustrated and humbled, I gave in. It felt like those Kung Fu movies where the student does strange, meaningless chores—until suddenly he realises he’s been training all along.

That was me. Those “useless” exercises were the foundations. Scales weren’t separate from music; they were the music. They were hidden inside every riff, every chord, every moment that sounded good. Once I accepted that, everything clicked. I gained the skill, the understanding, and finally the ability not just to imitate songs—but to create my own.

Around the same age, I fell in love with programming. For years I jumped between whatever was new: frameworks, clouds, AI, agents—always chasing the next shiny thing. Only recently did I realise something important: everything modern sits on top of a small set of timeless principles. The hype comes and goes. The fundamentals stay.

And again, just like the guitar, I recognised the pattern. The real power isn’t in the newest trend—it’s in the old “boring” building blocks that shape everything else. Master them deeply, and the whole matrix becomes understandable and controllable.

That’s why I started rebuilding my foundations from scratch. Not just reading concepts, but internalising them—running them through my mind and hands until they became part of me. The results are dramatic: my understanding of modern systems grew sharper, deeper, more connected.

Cryptography is one of those foundations. It looks distant and academic, yet every part of our digital world depends on it. Security is more important than ever, yet our actual understanding of it slips away behind layers of abstractions and frameworks.

So I’m going back to the source—relearning and rebuilding cryptography from the ground up.

And I invite you to join me on this journey into the fundamentals that truly matter.