A “crush” with code

I like to say that my profession chose me.

Long time ago I studied Fine Arts. I wouldn’t say that I was a “techie” person at that time, but luckily my father was. We had an AMSTRAD PC at home when I was just a kid. So, I started to create “digital paintings” with the fabulous software “Paint” like a lot of people.

Fortunately, in the middle of my academic career, I had the option to choose digital subjects like 3D animation, graphic design, or web design.

That’s when I discovered the power of the computer as a creation tool, and I fell in love.

The starting point

I really fell in love when I discovered coding, and it happened by chance when I was playing around with Macromedia Flash.

For those of you who have grown up with CSS 3, HTML 5, Angular or React, you might not be familiar with Flash. However, back in the 2000´s, it was a famous and loved tool.

Macromedia Flash was a Software that you needed to install on your computer, like Photoshop. It was an interesting mixture between an editing program, like Adobe Premier, and a vector creation program, like Illustrator, but it had something even more interesting, you could use it to code as well. What??

Yes, Flash gave you the possibility to create graphic elements and animate them in a timeline, frame by frame, but it also allowed you to program basic functionalities to control and interact with those elements via the UI or via the terminal.

I had my first “crush” on coding by playing with the deceleration formula. I was delighted to see a graphic element moving from point A to point B while I was able to control the velocity just by changing a number.

In fact, Macromedia Flash had its own programming language called ActionScript, an interesting version of Javascript, which in reality was my first contact with programming.

Over time, I have discovered that probably Flash was a very good graphic representation of OOP (Object Oriented Programming). And it was so useful, to “visual” people like me, to understand some abstract concepts.

Apart from this, Flash was the only chance that web developers had at that time to create more dynamic, interesting, and creative websites, moving away from boring HTML + CSS and some basic interaction with JQuery.

Unfortunately, to have a website entirely built with Flash was a “pain in the ass”. The projects were so heavy, and the browsers needed Macromedia Flash Player to be installed to make them work, and usually, a looong loading asking you to wait to load the entire page.

This was the problem with having a virtual machine (Flash) running inside another virtual machine (Browser), and having both running inside a physical machine (Computer).

But I have to say, for those who, just like me, were in love with Flash, we finally got to make it work in a very dynamic way, and there were so many creative websites.

As most of you know, today Flash has disappeared, almost completely, since, with the release of Chrome 76 in 2019, all Adobe Flash content was disabled by default.

In any case, that was my starting point to discover that I wanted to keep playing with code, so I did a Master in Multimedia Applications for the Internet. But I was still in love with 3D graphic animation, video, and graphic design, so I didn’t want to focus only on programming. I was so interested in the possibility of the Internet as a multidisciplinary platform.

Let’s start

My motivation led me to work in a couple of Publicity agencies where I used to combine programming with designing and video editing. Then I realized that what made me feel better, what really made me lose track of time was spending hours coding, trying to make some functionality work or even fighting with CSS to make the pixel-perfect design.

I have always said that the deep background I have in searching for creative, and new ways to create something from scratch, which is art, alongside my educational background in visual perception, aiming for balance and perfection, helped me a lot fitting in the programming world despite some lack of knowledge in other related subjects.

Apart from this, I was always good at learning languages ;)

Every day, I am more and more grateful for my unconscious choice to work in something that brings me new challenges on a daily basis. I wake up every morning with this exciting feeling of dealing with something that doesn’t work as expected and this thrill of learning how to solve it and make it work.

Let’s start!

“Now I’m part of the awesome Acquisitions team at CoverWallet, our main responsibility is to build and maintain hundreds of landing pages for all of our initiatives.”