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# A Geek Powered by Curiosity
- URL: https://zahradnik.io/a-geek-powered-by-curiosity/
- Published: 2025-11-27T23:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-30T19:37:55.000Z
- Author: Vladimír Záhradník
- Tags: Field notes, Hacker culture, Curiosity, Engineering, Programming, Creativity, Technology

**Originally published on LinkedIn (reformatted for zahradnik.io / Medium)**

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My range is broad — and for most people that usually signals a lack of depth.  
But I hope my recent posts made one thing clear:

> **👉 My depth matches my range.**

Today let’s put engineering and leadership aside.  
Let’s talk about my… unusual hobbies.

A few minutes ago, I watched a YouTube video where someone tried to install an antique **Voodoo 2 GPU** into **Windows 11**.

**Spoiler alert: he succeeded.**

Some absolute madman wrote a brand new Win11 driver by reverse‑engineering the original 1990s Windows NT driver — building an **NT→Win11 API translation layer** so the old DLLs still work.

This is where Paul Graham was right:

> **Hackers and painters really are the same species.**

I’m one of the rare ones who sees **code as art**.

- The person who writes an NVMe SSD driver for Windows 2000
- The one who builds a translation layer between operating systems
- The hacker who resurrects dead hardware on a modern OS

These people are *artists*.  
Their medium just happens to be **logic**, not oil paint.

---

And if I had Hermione’s Time‑Turner, I’d spend entire days:

- reverse‑engineering old binaries
- building emulators for forgotten consoles
- writing tiny tech demos that nobody asked for

Because when I do projects like these, **ten hours feel like one**.

At my core, I am a hacker — and a painter — who decided to scale my curiosity upward and hack something larger:

> **the world.**

That’s why I’m here.  
Not as a programmer anymore —  
but as a founder.

**Let’s hack the world for the better.**