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Alexander Gese opened his first JavaScript file at eleven years old, the way other children might open a sketchbook. Six years later, he has shipped six production projects, completed a nine-module IBM Professional Data Science specialization, and finished third at the Jackpot Hack Club hackathon in Las Vegas. He is, by every external measure that matters in this industry, a working software developer. He is also still in high school.

Gese moves between Frankfurt, Paris, and Dubai. He switched schools mid-Gymnasium to pursue a computer-science focus at Hermann Staudinger Gymnasium in Erlenbach, and expects to sit his Abitur in 2027. In the meantime he has built a full-stack LLM-powered CEO-training simulation called the Aegis Protocol, a suite of agency tools that handle lead scraping, cold outreach, and analytics under the name Kova, and — perhaps most unusually for a self-taught teenager — a complete machine-learning library written in pure C. The library, MyML, has tensor operations, automatic differentiation, layered networks, optimizers, and a working backpropagation pass that trains a small neural net to solve XOR. It is the kind of project working adults put on conference slides.

His path has not been a degree program, but it has not been chaotic either. He spent 2021 on JavaScript fundamentals. He spent 2024 changing schools to chase the CS track. He spent the summer of 2025 inside the IBM Data Science specialization, completing all nine courses on a timeline most professionals would call implausible. By the autumn of that year he had placed second at Hacknation 2025, the national hackathon in Poland. By spring of 2026 he was on a guest list for Dubai AI Week — by invitation only.

Asked what he is doing this season, he answers: “Low-level, mostly.” He wants to understand the floor of the machine before university makes him stop — registers, memory layout, the way a CPU actually executes a function call. He is reading The Pragmatic Programmer. The current obsession, he says, is system architecture.

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