I grew up in Rongai. Small town. Youngest voice in the room, always. My friends were older and they had a way of making me feel tiny in this world — not out of cruelty, just out of the natural physics of age gaps. I learned early to take up less space. I also learned that curiosity doesn't care about your rank. I was ten years old asking my mom what words meant — the hard ones — and she just started calling me curious like it was my name.

Hip-hop found me around the same time. Not casually — obsessively. I was the kid who had opinions about Eminem vs Lil Wayne and would argue them at length to anyone who'd listen. The lyricism specifically. The way you could pack a whole philosophy into sixteen bars. I wanted to do that. By high school I was writing raps, battling kids in the corridors, teaching myself by sheer repetition. Then Form 2 — a cracked copy of FL Studio, and something shifted permanently.

I stopped being a consumer of music and became someone who needed to understand how it was made.

That need followed me to college, where I studied IT and made beats in every spare hour. At some point I uninstalled Windows and put Arch Linux on my machine — because I wanted real control, not the illusion of it. This is where things got complicated. FL Studio doesn't run on Linux. So I went looking.

Reaper: no pattern-based workflow. Waveform: uninstalled within two hours, genuinely confused. LMMS: called itself the FL clone. It was not. Clunky. Old UI. The audio engine wasn't close.

My DAW wasn't on Linux. It didn't exist.

So I Googled how to build one.

Reddit told me: don't try. Everyone else said: use JUCE. I looked into JUCE, traced it back to the Tracktion engine — the same engine Waveform ran on. The license was brutal. So I went from scratch. Full scratch. And I made a vow: finish this DAW for anyone who ever needed that experience and never got it.

I named it NOMAD first. Then Aestra.

The build has been genuinely hard. Constant crashes. UI glitches. Audio blasts at 3am that I'm still apologizing to my ears for. Migraines that made me question my life choices at a cellular level. I started a web agency — PlainSight Digital — to fund the development, because dreams don't run on passion alone, they run on runway.

I'm still building it. Closer than I've ever been.

The plan is to finish my album on Aestra. Not as a flex. As proof. That the thing you needed, that didn't exist, that everyone told you not to try to build — you can actually build it. With enough time, enough stubbornness, and enough love for the craft.

That's what this whole thing is about.