I have my best moments but the first time I felt badass about computers was when I was at kindergarten.

There was one computer with one cool game with skateboard. I wanted to play but the other kids didn’t let me.

I thought that if it look like I fix the computer they will let me. I took me month or little more but I made shutdown bat(I didn’t really understood fully) and I added it to the game shortcut from usb.

One of the other kids started the game and the computer turned itself off. Hi tried a few times and then I offered to fix it, I created new shortcut replacing the “hacked” one and the game ran.

From that moment the computer and the game were always free for me.

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

I wonder which programming language does Batman use given that he has all the sophisticated techs and gadgets.

I was taking an Intro to Java class and we had an assignment where we had to create a program that would show a splash screen while loading. I used the new native splash screen functionality in Java 6 which just came out. The teacher gave me an F because he said, "I couldn't get your program to work." I told him, "I included a bat file that has the -splash parameter in it and I also gave you a JAR file you could launch and maybe you should update java on his computer." He never responded. That is when I knew this was a worthless class. I did get A's on the remaining assignments.

In elementary school, when I got my first computer (a 286 with b/w monitor and a whopping 8mhz), I discovered that a .bat file was nothing more than a set of instructions.

So my first "programs" where nothing more than .bat files. Then, at summer camp, one of the instructors noticed I was kind of a nerd, so he introduced me to QBasic. Later on, a friend of my mother showed me Turbo Pascal 6.0. So I was already creating games when I left elementary school.

Then, on secondary school, I stopped most of my programming stuff and was mostly interested in drawing and making music.

But, on college I rediscovered programming with Flash, HTML, PHP and Director. This was around the time that AS2 and PHP4 were still cool.

Later on, in university, I became nerd full on, but still the main focus on web development.

I use to have a very slow computer so i google search how to speed it

It came with a .bat script that refresh the ram, after that i wanted to know how that script had work.
And 11ish years later is my life and career

And, yeah, at that time i didn't care about security and why you shouldn't run a script without know what does it do 😅

Also, that script get lost forever in my broken old computer