I grew up in France. I first started using computers at my dad’s office, when I was 7 or 10. I’d spend some Wednesday afternoons there, using his extra machine. I used to play Wolf 3D (also known as Wolfenstein 3D). Loved that game, then I also used to love to change the programs’ icons on my father’s desktop. That was fun. Before the Internet.
When I was around 14 or 16, we got the Internet at home. It was very new, people mostly used it for email, chat (AOL), and some searching on Yahoo!. Right away, I wanted to make my own sites. I bought a few books on HTML and got started. This is one of the first wesbites I built. That’s April 5th, 2001, a bit over 15 years ago.
On this site, I would write up and upload my notes from my school classes (so my classmates could use them), showcase events happening in the city I lived in, share some “tips” on how to create your own websites… oh and also had a gif directory. Remember these?
I never knew you could make a career out of programming, and that I could even go study for it. So instead I went to business school. But on the side, for fun, I would spend hours tinkering with my websites. Somehow in all those years I never learned the real art of programming.
Which is why I am here today. I love to build new solutions, but I often feel limited by my programming knowledge. I want to understand every line of code I put down on a page. I want to be able to write more complex programs. I’m tired of being a hacker, and a tinkerer. I want to be an engineer.