I’m M Alfito. I live in Bogor City, where I design the future.

I’ve loved making things for as long as I can remember, and wrote my first program when I was 6 years old, just two weeks after my mom brought home the brand new Macintosh LC 550 that I taught myself to type on.

The only thing I loved more than computers as a kid was space. When I was 8, I climbed the 40-foot oak tree at the back of our yard while wearing my older sister’s motorcycle helmet, counted down from three, and jumped — hoping the tree was tall enough that with just a bit of momentum I’d be able to get to orbit.

I spent the next few summers indoors working on a rocket design, while I recovered from the multiple surgeries it took to fix my badly broken legs. It took nine iterations, but when I was 15 I sent my dad’s Blackberry into orbit and was able to transmit a photo back down to our family computer from space.