My history of computing
My family bought a computer for the first time in 1988. I was six years old, home alone with my mom and I badly wanted to play those funny games that I were playing the day before. Though, my mom did not know how to operate the computer and I was not allowed, the urge got too much and I decided to give it a try. I had seen the procedure before and I knew what to do. I had just never done it myself. So, I flipped the power switch and waited for the screen to show
Heart was pounding in 200 bpm as I selected the disc that should play my favourite game (). I inserted it into the floppy and the game started to load.
Fast forward in memory...
At twelve of age I sit at home during the summer on my fathers work laptop (Cyrix 586), playing Doom 2 he lumps a thick book in my knee. - It is time for you to learn how to write your own games, he says, and I start the long and tedious task of learning Turbo Pascal.
After 6 months I had written a music library that used a linked list of structs for in memory handling and could both save and load the library from disc. Debugging linked lists was something I would get back to 12 years later as I was relearning this in my university studies.
Fast forward in memory...
Nineteen years old I moved from my parents house to my own apartment where I spent the nights building my own Linux distribution and the days learning Lisp at LiTH. It was a fascinating language and the school had a fascinating nerd culture.
Infinite recursions made my head spin and in the evenings I would do some relaxing PHP3 coding, creating communities that were totally unmaintainable. I also had a short fling with Java, but the compiler errors made me irritated. Especially after a short course in ADA with compiler errors like 'You misspelled your method name in line 123.'
Fast forward in memory...
As I studied computer science at KTH Stockholm around 2005, there was a choice to be made between Java or .NET technologies. Since all my friends and close relations were Microsoft haters, I choose .NET as a platform because I wanted to experience something new. I was astounded by the ease of getting started with C# and I felt I could be productive right away. Today I work mainly with ASP.NET 3.5 web apps and is quite happy with that. It would be interesting working on a heavy client software application sometime, but I like the problems that web applications present. Heavy integration and scalability with thousands of users. I feel very flexible, so who knows what technology I'll be working with tomorrow. Maybe Ruby, F# or Scala?