About
Hey, I'm Aria.
Here's the story.
Hacking iPhones at twelve. Self-taught engineer. Held three lead-dev roles simultaneously. Then the videos took off — and they kept going.
2011
Twelve. My sister's locked iPhone.
My sister had an iPhone 4 stuck on the iOS 5 activation screen. Locked. I was twelve, bored, and curious.
Bypassed it by holding power + emergency-call + a couple of keystrokes, filmed myself doing it, uploaded to YouTube. The voiceover, verbatim: "I did this all by myself. I never knew how to do this stuff. I just did it one day, I was bored."
It blew up. 40,000 views on the first thing I ever put on the internet. Tells you everything you need to know about what came next.
Lead dev
Three lead-dev roles. At the same time.
Self-taught my way into engineering. No bootcamp credential, no big-tech badge — just years of reps, books, broken builds, and rebuilt ones.
Made it to lead dev at a fintech and built the platform from zero. Architecture, infra, the trading interface, the data pipeline — all of it.
Then I stacked it. At one point I was the lead dev at three companies simultaneously — fintech and healthcare, all in production, all under deadlines that didn't care I was triple-booked.
Lead engineer is a title. Building the thing it points at is the actual work.
Sep 22, 2025
The first video.
Posted my first video on Instagram. Nervous, scared, half-convinced I was about to embarrass myself — and you can hear it in my voice if you go back and watch it. 200 views.
Funny, considering the last thing I'd uploaded to the internet — the iOS 5 bypass at twelve — got forty thousand. I was going to keep posting either way.
Sep 29, 2025
First viral.
One week in. A video about lmarena.ai — the fact that you could compare frontier AI models for free — went off. Followers jumped overnight.
The platform had decided I was useful. That's the only signal I needed.
Dec 2025
200K in 90 days.
Ninety days from the first 200-view video to this: 200,000 followers on Instagram. No agency. No paid boosts. No favors from the algorithm.
One post a day, every day, while I was still triple-booked as a lead dev. Half the days nobody cared — then a video would catch and a week of growth would happen in an afternoon.
This is what compounding looks like when you don't quit at day 30. Or 60. Or any of the days the views went flat and the inbox went quiet.
Late 2025
5.1M views.
An OSINT playbook — from a username to a password, how to check if your accounts have been breached, what to actually do about it. The video crossed five million views.
It's also where the cybersecurity and threat-intel thread on this profile started. Quiet undercurrent of what I do — and the same instinct that made twelve-year-old me poke at iOS 5 until something gave.
2026
No agency. No middle.
Multiple agencies tried to sign me. I said no every time.
The math on signing with one is simple: you trade authenticity for upside. The audience can tell the difference between a real recommendation and a sponsored slot. So can the brands worth working with. The trust is the whole asset — I'm not selling it.
Now
What I'm building.
I take on a small handful of custom AI builds at a time. Some solo. Some with a small team I pull in for bigger work.
If you're a founder, operator, or team that needs custom AI shipped — bring the problem. I quote a fixed price after a 30-minute discovery call. 24-hour response, M–F.
On a more personal note
Outside of all the AI stuff…
A few beats that explain the why behind the how.
Where it started
Tech nerd from day one.
Always had my hands on whatever computer was in arm's reach. Family desktop, school library tower, the demo unit at the electronics store — if it had a keyboard I was inside it.
Other kids wanted to be in the NBA. I wanted to know how the box score got generated.
On the court
Varsity ball, then college ball at SMC.
Played basketball varsity through high school, then suited up at SMC at the college level. Six AM lifts, late film sessions, road trips that felt like a second job.
The game taught me reps. You don't get better watching the highlight — you get better at 5 AM, alone, missing shots until they stop missing.
The dropout
Left school because the side hustle outpaced the major.
Started flipping product on eBay and Amazon in the dorm. Pretty quickly I was clearing more on a slow month than most of my professors made in a quarter.
The math on staying enrolled stopped making sense. So I left SMC. The diploma I would have walked across the stage for cost more than the one I built myself.
Outside the work
Animals, mostly.
If I'm not coding or filming, there's a non-zero chance I'm somewhere with a dog. I'll sneak my way into a rescue volunteer shift whenever the calendar allows it.
Travel is in here too. The road resets the brain in a way no number of side-quests at the desk can.
Now
Building, posting, exploring.
Day-to-day: ship for clients, film, repeat. Most weeks I'm testing whatever AI tool just dropped before the dust settles.
Sitting still has never really been the plan.
Where to next
Want to explore what's here?
Three places to land. Pick whichever maps to where you are.