Receiving the first Computer (Chapter 1)
I remember I was twelve years old in. It was Christmas time. We got our first PC. I was hoping for this machine for a year. I would talk about long to everyone how much I want one and what I would do if I would own one. My excitement was so big, I even opened a journal with a lot of drawn pictures to capture my expectations.
That Christmas my parents bought one PC (Pentium II, Win 98) and they wanted to start the music once we entered the room. The Music Player was playing the song, but there was no sound. My first experience with the new Machine was to turn on the speakers.
I was obsessed to learn how it works. When my time was over and could not sit in front of it, I would stand there like a guard and keep watching my siblings what they were doing.
I had this usual game playing time but then I got questions. How people make these Applications. Will I also able to do the same?
At that time there was no internet connection, at least not in my village but I somehow started to figure out how things work. Yeah, my father needed to carry the Machine to be fixed every month. Because of my junior hacking mania I was denied so many times to use it.
I started to Code
I chose my secondary school based on my passion for technology, mainly for computers. The study was a bit different than I expected, it was more about hardware than software. Back in 2005 in my school it was still cool to create integrated circuits, so I was ok with that. It meant a lot of fun…I just always wanted to skip the theory.
Around my village there were not too much summer job options for students. Not at all involving some technology. What we got is farming, but it still gave some money.
The good side of this, I got a lot of free time. I had a nice new book, which we got from school for next year studies — usually the books were outdated and used million times. It was about Turbo Pascal programming language. It was so well written with a lot of graphical exercise, I finished the book before we started with the new school year. I would spend everyday some hours to read and do all the exercise. In the end I created a small game where a tank was shooting. It was not that cool as there was no enemy, anyways.
From this point I started to learn more about coding. I knew I was not a geek, I just liked to create something which works. The creation process made me feel good and I always had a lot of ideas what I wanted to make happen.
Years after, still in secondary school, I shifted to Adobe Flash. I started to create Animations of all kinds. Small games, small clickable animations. I just loved it. Was so much fun. Thanks to this “hobby” during my college studies I got my first part time job — Flash Developer.
It was a job that I loved. I was creating Teaching Apps for kids in Flash. I learned a bit of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I met first time with Graphical Illustrators working on Mac, on a really old Mac. From some reason they always told me, if I want a good salary, I need to be a designer at Apple.
I was not aware, but the most what I enjoyed in this work, was to design the App. I created animations and started to share best practices. I would think about the next cool animation during the night and make it happen. As there was not part time jobs in that company, I got two months to prove I can do the job, so I gave what I got. The App for Skeleton was a success. The company sold more than any App ever. I could stay and work next to my studies.
Later on there were quite a lot of things with which I disagreed (quantity over quality) and I saw that Flash Technology was dying. So I felt I need to switch. There was no time anymore for fancy animations. I was still student at university and I went crazy by trying out so many different things. Started to learn Web Development, we had semesters in the college too, in my free time started to play around animations which I created using Blender 3d modeller and animator app, it’s a cool one. I tried to take up small web development projects, but they did not work out.
As the end of my college studies came, I made some market research and I saw that Java Development is blooming in my country. It was also part of few semesters in my university so was no problem to collect the basic knowledge. I think I just wanted to be sure, that I will get a good job after finishing my studies. I missed to find out more about what I really want and what makes me feel passionate. I did not pay too much attention to it.
After I graduated I got a job as a Consultant Java Developer at one big corporation. It was not a mistake, thanks to this company I gained so much in life, but something was bothering me.
First, I thought there was something wrong with me. Most of the days I needed extra amount of caffeine to keep myself awake in office. I felt empty and my motivation level was low. I could financially allow myself to go for dream vacations, journeys and a lot of company events, but all of this was not enough to compensate my emptiness. I needed to find answers.
