I'm Inaya, I'm 19, and I've lived in the Paris area for all of it.

I'm agender. Not a blank where a gender should be, more an active refusal of the two boxes on offer. Both feel equally wrong, and it took me embarrassingly long to notice, because I kept assuming the answer had to be one or the other. In French my pronoun is ille. In English, they. I started transitioning in October 2025, mostly voice, hair and how I dress.

I have spinal muscular atrophy, type 2. A powered wheelchair, help with most physical things, and I run out of energy sooner than I'd like. It never touched the part of me that wants to know how things work, and the gap between those two is more or less the story of how I learned everything I know.

I overthink most things and people make me anxious, so I probably come across as distant for the first while. That isn't the intent. I'd take one real conversation over an evening of small talk.

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I understand things through structure. Give me the model and I'll keep it. Give me a list of facts to memorise and it's gone by Thursday.

So what I keep landing on is a small number of primitives, each one bendy enough to cover a lot of ground, instead of a pile of special cases. There's less to hold in my head that way, and the reasoning carries from one situation to the next. People assume I took that from programming. It's the other way round. Code is just where it shows up most cleanly. It isn't really a preference either, because too many moving pieces at once and I genuinely stop working.

Some things read to me as doors. An idea, a piece of software, a record, an aesthetic. Something that opens onto a room worth spending real time in. The frustration is seeing a door and not having the energy to walk through it, and on a bad day that sits closer to grief than to annoyance. I don't need to see every room. I need it to be possible to follow one all the way down when it turns up.

The way I learn is production first. I take a real problem and do the whole thing badly, before I know how, then check it against something that won't flatter me. A compiler, a worked solution, a person who knows. Every point I lost becomes one line noting what I was missing, and that list is my only revision document. It never has the syllabus in it, only holes I actually fell into. Then the next problem. This is why lectures have never worked on me, and why rereading gives me the feeling of knowing something without the knowing. The hard part was never the work. It was giving myself permission to make the bad first version.

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I spent eleven years at EREA Toulouse-Lautrec, in Vaucresson. It's a state school that takes students with motor disabilities from primary all the way up to BTS, with the care side built into the building instead of bolted on, and it has a real reputation for doing that well. I had a great time there. Art ran alongside the whole thing, which is how I ended up starting a Licence Arts Plastiques at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in September 2023. The workload burned me out and I left in May 2025. Leaving did nothing to the part that cares. I still follow the work, the people making it, and the arguments about what any of it is for. Right now I'm doing a BTS SIO SLAM on an apprenticeship contract.

C, Go, TypeScript. What pulls me sits low. Runtimes and virtual machines, operating systems, drivers, firmware, and especially the seam where firmware hands off to the OS. What I want from a system is to be able to walk down it. Every layer legible, no floor I have to take on faith. I'll take C and hand-written linking over a build system doing five things I can't name, and I'd rather an error be loud at the point where it happens. The thing that actually gets me is a clean optimisation across two layers that had no obvious business talking to each other.

Drum and bass, hyperpop, funk. Wilkinson has been my most played artist four years running, which stopped being a coincidence a while ago. I'm learning beatbox and the goal isn't tricks, it's to be a drum kit that happens to be a person. Groove, timing, and locking in with someone else playing. Right now I've got inward bass, throat bass, the standard kit and some synthetic textures, and I hear subdivisions well enough to sit in a pocket. What I'm working on is transitions, and patterns that hold together as a piece instead of a pile of sounds I can do.

I play a lot of games, mostly multiplayer or the kind you fall into. Cyberpunk 2077 has a permanent seat. I watch anime. I'm vegetarian.

Easiest way to reach me is X, and the code is on GitHub.

And please never forget that this world needs you and that you are loved.