and how I became an efficient caffeine-to-code converter
My journey in the world of computers began in the late 90s. I was still a kid. Those were the glorious internetless (new word) days of Borland C++, Basic and Pascal. There was no MDN, nor MSDN, just some old programming books me and my brother found under the bed. I was fascinated by their looks, by the covers filled with PC parts and numbers. Not knowing that I’m about to begin a journey down the path of caffeine addiction, I was eager to find everything they had to offer. There I learned that HGR exists with its magnificent 280×192 resolution and that you can draw with code. My first programmable green pixel came to life on the screen of a 10 year old monochrome Soviet era computer. I felt like a miracle and it’s still the proudest moment of my life.
Flash forward to 2001. I have my first “modern” PC with 700 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM, and a fan noise that puts vacuum cleaners to shame. That same year I wrote my first HTML pages and Visual Basic 6 was my first encounter with desktop programming. From there I gradually began using C++, MFC and C#, when it first came out in 2003. Back in those days JavaScript was still a toddler and Flash was the cool kid on the block. It blew me away how easy it was to create your designs in Macromedia Flash, write some Action Script code, and have the whole thing work in any browser. I also worked on the first project to ever earn me money and Flash made it possible. My love with Flash continued and with it I won several competitions in my home country.
We are now 2007, I’ve been a university student for a year. Adobe Flash grew into Flex 3 and 4 and I began my first full time job, working on a kids friendly MMO. The work on that game was amazing, but it had to evolve with technologies. Several years later and this virtual world gradually became mobile games for iOS and Android, compiled as AIR mobile hybrid applications. Let’s not forget Windows 8 Mobile – yes, it’s easy to forget it existed, but it got me into XAML and C# for mobile and desktop.
In 2013 I decided I needed a change. My Flash & Flex days were over, long live the new king – HTML5. And so I entered the world of freelancing – web clients with HTML5, CSS3 and SASS, Bootstrap (2, 3 and 4) with elastic, responsive and fluid designs. With bigger SPA projects, things like Gulp, Grunt, Bower and Webpack came into my life. It was a wild ride, with projects lasting from few days to several months, often on a hard deadline. Development had to be fast and use single codebase for websites and mobile apps. That’s how I met Cordova (a.k.a. PhoneGap) and with it I built business apps and several games with heavy canvas API drawing.
All those mobile first websites and apps required a backend. And backend they had – in the form for Laravel, Code Igniter 3 and Twig templates. Soon those hybrid mobile apps weren’t native enough for the taste of my clients and I delved into React Native. From there it was natural to start using Node with Express.
At the end of that journey another big project came into fruition. A large content management platform with heavy usage of AngularJS and jQuery. That AngularJS soon became Angular 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… (who’s counting anymore) and Typescript, which made the good old JavaScript manageable again.
While doing everything mentioned above, I had to chance to work on several more projects of various sizes, with heavy usage of React and Redux and server side React rendering. I would be happy to tell you more about them, but no matter how talkative your are, there are always NDAs.
That’s all I have to say so far, but the story is not over yet.
More chapters will come, and I’ll share them with you.
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