The firsts I remember.

The cap and gown, the toss-in-the-air shots, the dozens of grinning campus photos — I still have the full graduation set saved somewhere. But behind those photos sits four and a half years of IT, and the honest truth is I barely learned anything in those lecture halls. SQL, data structures, networking — they all skipped across my brain like rain on a tin roof. Start of semester I would register the modules, mid-semester I attended just enough to clear attendance, end of semester I crammed for two nights and walked into the exam — passing was enough. Why? Because I was busy at a part-time job.

I spent nearly three years grinding shifts at Lotteria near campus. Started as a floor runner, gradually became the utility player — any station they called, I jumped on. Morning shift at the kitchen, frying chicken, hot oil flecking my forearms in red burns, one hand on the tongs and the other assembling burgers to the beep-beep of the order tray. Afternoon shifts I swung into stockroom loading — hauling crates of chicken, fries, crushed ice from delivery trucks into the cold room until my shoulders ached well into the night. Closing shifts were cleanup duty: clearing sink drains, snaking the kitchen gutter, scrubbing the freezers, mopping greasy floors until the rag turned charcoal grey. Clocking out at 11 PM, my uniform reeking permanently of fryer oil, I would ride my old Wave Alpha home — drained, but with a strange buzz of joy in my chest. Because tomorrow there was work. Because end of month there was pay. Because I was paying for my own life.

The pay was minimum wage plus a night-shift bonus — not life-changing — but Lotteria taught me what the lecture hall never could: every job is exhausting in its own particular way, money earned with your hands feels real (you count every note, wipe the sweat off, then slide it into your wallet), and the night-shift coworkers each carried a story, swapped across the mop bucket. Four and a half years technically in classrooms, but in honest terms those three years on the Lotteria line were my real school of life.

It was not until the second half of year four that I genuinely touched web programming — not from a professor, not from a syllabus, but from Hoàng Công Thành, my closest classmate, a kid from Thái Bình province, chubby and unreasonably lovable in his own particular way. Thành knew I could fry chicken in my sleep but had never written a single line of PHP, so he sat me down at his laptop, fired up XAMPP, and stumbled through teaching me starting from the very first HTML tag. PHP, MySQL, jQuery, a bit of Bootstrap — whatever Thành taught, I learned, arguing about syntax along the way, sharing hard drives full of pirated Pluralsight courses, laughing the first time a login form actually worked. Those six months were the first six real months of learning in the entire journey — and they did not happen in a classroom. Cheers, Thành — you were the first person who actually taught me how to code 🍻.

On graduation day I assumed life would pivot into something cinematic. The vlog narrator voice, "today is the first day of the rest of my life", and so on. The reality: the next morning was a job interview, the morning after that was my first real deadline at a real company. No happy ending — just a new scene loading.

That is when it clicked: the degree is not the end of learning. It is a receipt. Proof you sunk four years into the foundations (plus six accelerated months thanks to Thành). After that, you still have to keep collecting, keep debugging your life, keep shipping a 1.0 of yourself out into the world.

Before the 12 mini, I always ran second-hand phones — an iPhone 6S inherited from a past girlfriend, an iPhone XS Max bought used from some guy on the local Chợ Tốt marketplace. Not stingy — I just saw how fast new phones lose value. Drop a five-hundred-something on a new phone today and six months later the resale tag is two-thirds of that. Buying brand-new felt like literally burning money.

Late 2020, I decided: once in my life, I would do the proper unboxing thing. Apple had just launched the 12 mini and it fit me perfectly — pocketable, palm-sized, the most reasonable price in the lineup. I ordered online, waited five days, and when it arrived my hands shook like a brand-new YouTuber filming his first unbox.

Pulled the seal. Smelled an Apple box for the first time in my life. Lifted the plastic slowly, like a ritual. Powered on. 'Hello' across the screen. Wildly different from setting up some used phone someone else has wiped five times.

After that? Right back to second-hand. That very 12 mini lasted me until 2024, when I swapped it out for… another second-hand phone. 😂

This was unboxing #1 of my life. Unboxing #2 was the MacBook three months later (next chapter). Lifetime total: TWO — one phone, one laptop. After that? Second-hand forever. Sounds odd for a dev whose income comes from Apple gear, but it is the truth. Every piece of new tech after this, I waited six months for the price to drop and bought used.

P.S. Unboxing for girlfriends is a different story — frugal with myself, slightly more open wallet for the partner. That is all 😎.

The YouTube algorithm knows. It started pushing MotoGP. Then Vietnamese vloggers reviewing sport bikes. Then pretty girls riding pillion. My logic screamed 'no', my feelings whispered 'okay just try it'. Feelings won — they always win against a 25-year-old who just got his first stable salary.

October 2021, I tracked down a used R15V3 — all-black, one previous owner, priced a fair bit below new. Aggressive riding position, hands wrapping the tank, feet kicked back like I was about to launch out of pit lane in Sepang. Standing at the seller’s place admiring it: "wow this is beautiful".

Here is a detail I have kept quiet until now: at the moment I wired the money to the previous owner, I did not even know how to ride a manual clutch bike. Not once in my life had I touched a clutch lever. I bought it because it looked cool, because I thought a girl on the back would love it — a daydream photo I had built in my head: some girl on the pillion seat, hair flying around West Lake at sunset. Tiny problem: I had no girl to put back there. Where was logic? Logic was asleep. Feelings were holding the credit card.

On pickup day, I had to call my younger brother along to ride it home for me — I stood there staring at the clutch lever, no idea where to even put my left foot. I rode pillion, hugging my backpack, silently listening to him explain 'manual is easy bro, just ease off the clutch'. Once home, I started learning to ride a manual — on the very bike I had just emptied my savings for. The first few times I stalled mid-intersection at red lights, an entire row of cars honking behind me. Embarrassing beyond words — and not something I dared tell anyone, because it was physical evidence that I had bought the bike on pure impulse.

Once the clutch hand was trained, the next move in my head was... make it cooler. Off to the decal shop: half the bike wrapped as Optimus Prime in red and blue, the other half as Megatron in purple-grey — two Transformers facing off across the fairings like they were about to body-slam each other mid-engine. Standing back to admire it, I rated the result 'absolutely sick'. Brutal reality: I was the only one who thought so. Outsiders had... mixed reactions.

After three months I had a full report: engine heat blasting my inner thighs in Hanoi traffic, back pain after every 20km, wrists tense from the riding position, shoulders sore from leaning forward, and shirts permanently sweat-soaked because the riding posture blocks airflow. The "cool" payoff lasted seconds — at red lights, when someone glanced over. Then back to the pain marathon from lumbar to neck. The imaginary girl on the pillion? Still has not shown up.

Plus: no storage compartment, soaked in every shower, paranoid about scratches at every parking spot. On weekends I would grab the SH for coffee runs while the R15 sat at home gathering dust.

In the end, that R15V3 has been sitting at home gathering dust for nearly three years now. Every couple of months I roll it out, fire it up to keep the battery alive, take it for a wash, and tuck it back into the corner. The takeaway is simple: looking good and feeling good are two unrelated things. And feelings beat logic — even when you are a dev trained to think in trees and graphs. Optimus and Megatron are still stuck on the fairings, watching me sigh every time I walk past.

P.S. Side note — if anyone reading this far is in the market for an all-black R15V3 with Optimus/Megatron decals to keep as a "living-room ornament", DM me. Very low miles, stock engine, full Transformers paint job, price negotiable. Sell my lesson, buy your story 😎.

From 100M to 1B took three years. Three years of grinding code, freelancing alongside full-time, side projects, a few bad deals (anyone who has never had a bad deal has not freelanced long enough), some larger contracts beyond expectation, learning real personal investing (not crypto-pump nonsense), and most importantly: cutting out impulse spending.

I applied a principle I called "spend like the previous version of yourself". In 2024 I spent at 2023 levels even though income had jumped. The delta automatically routed into savings before I could touch it. The finance books call it "pay yourself first" — and it actually works.

June 2025, the banking app showed 10 digits. Enough to buy a small apartment in Hanoi (if you accept being far from the center), or to live a little luxuriously for a few years doing absolutely nothing.

But I did not buy a place. I did not quit my job. Instead, I parked it inside the company I work for — 1Office — through their internal capital program, paying 1% per month. That is ~12% APR, roughly double a bank deposit (5-6% a year) at the time. The money stays close, interest lands monthly on schedule, and I happen to know the company well enough that the risk reads more comfortable than dropping it into some ticker I just learned the name of. At 2 AM that night, I felt like I had just done something very "adult".

12% a year is not the rocket lane — not a top-of-cycle crypto bet, not an IPO lottery ticket. But it is the calm lane, and each month I open the app and see the number tick up exactly on schedule. Approaching 30, "calm" sometimes outranks "fast". I am still young enough to take big risks, and old enough to know big risks are not always worth taking.

For me, this 1B is not a destination — it is a new starting line. Now I can ask each month: "what do I want to build this month?" instead of "how much do I need to earn to survive this month?". That is the difference very few blogs talk about.