Hello, Medium!
I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in a time when Venezuelans were more worried about what would happen in the telenovelas and baseball games than about what they were going to eat the next day. At that moment, there were no self-driving cars, smartphones, Play Station, Internet, Tamagotchis or CDs. Actually, the first cell phone I remember seeing was so big it was carried in a briefcase, which for some random reason was lent to a vain kid in my school.
My dad, who was already retired when I was born, had a not-so-common device in Venezuelan households at the time: a PC. He used it for several things, but I remember specially he used to create Christmas cards with digital drawings for friends and family and printed them using a dot matrix printer. He also used it to do some programming, and he had so many books! COBOL, BASIC, Logo, Fortran… I don't think he read most of them, though.
I think I was allowed to use my dad's computer for the first time when I was 4, and played most probably a clone of Space Invaders. When I was 7, I already had a PC, shared with my brother, but we used it only to play games like Prince of Persia. Around that time, my dad gave me a BASIC book (that is a programming language) and taught me how to run GW-BASIC. That’s how I started programming.
As it is common when learning a programming language, the first thing in the book explained how to print something in the screen. The exercise I remember the most was about the Brooklyn bridge, using print statements to tell its story.
Soon after I learned the basics, I started creating programs that were able to determine the perimeter and area of a geometric figure, given its dimensions. When there was the moment to learn about that in the school, I already knew how to do it: I created a program that could easily solve my homework. I didn't think it was cool at the moment, though, because the problems were easy enough not to use it.
Sadly, probably because of a dramatic change of school and schedule, I stopped programming when I was 9 years old. I didn’t do it again until I was 14 or 15 years old (year 2000–2001), when I wanted to create a website. I learned a bit of HTML and started using Macromedia Flash (now Adobe’s) and Photoshop to create a website with photos of my high school's friends and classmates. It was really fun. I experimented with photo edition, animations and visual elements to create the website, so I learned a bunch of things. Also, it was super nice to know that people engaged with it. It was almost 20 years ago.
Since that time, I studied Computer Engineering, have worked programming video games and a bunch of Web and mobile applications, studied other things, moved away from my country… and I continue programming. 20 years later, I'm missing a bit what it was to have a project like that website: a project with purpose, shared with more people, fun and mine.
It is time to reboot.
