I learned to code before I learned to multiply 🪵

When I was 5 years old, my mom did get an old white and big computer. Where I did start to play flash games online. Every morning and every afternoon I was playing on the computer. I remember those times as nice memories, it was fun!

When I was 8 years old I started to think that I wanted to do my own website, I was fascinated with the Google history that I watched somewhere online. And I wanted to be like it. This was the time where I did my first ever site, using PHP, HTML and MySQL. I develop a simple website where you can search for stuff, but of course, the sites database needed to be filled manually.

At that time I was going to a civic center in my city because they had computer leasons. There I was fascinating the techer, he was amazed with a 8 years old doing a website. When I show him the site he did ask: You did a search engine?! Does it index?!

At that time I did not know what that word mean, but as soon as I arrived home I started to look into it. And I implemented a very simple php cronjob to extract all the sites from the existing sites at the database. I was super proud of my creation, and even today, I still remember that project.

After this project I started to do many different sites, I was drawing websites in paper during class lessons everyday, and when I was home, I was doing that. It was a challenge to make the websites look like my drawings, since the search project did not have any style, it was plan HTMl, with no css. During this period is where I did learn to do CSS.

My teachers where starting to get concerned because I was not doing any home work, I was literally ignoring class leasons. For my doing websites was super fun and challenging, and homework was nonsense. But we reach an agreement. I did a website for my teachers to publish my homeworks in there, in a digital format.

Things did continue the same, but when I was 10 years old I started to play Habbo Hotel with my school friends. It was fun, but after a few months we started to struggle because the game needed to pay real money for almost everything. Then is when a friend of machine-learning did send me a link to another site, that was like a copy of Habbo, but with everything free. That was called a "Habbo holo" a kind clone of the original game but run by the community.

Here is when things got interesting! Until now I was only doing stuff using free hostings, but now I needed to execute a game server, and I had no money to pay it. So I was doing it on my own computer. I had to open network ports, setup an apache server for the website, execute the game server "emulator" made by the community and run it 24/7. I started to have a small playerbase and also all my friends where playing there, it was super fun and I did enjoy this project a lot!

And here is when the history begings. When I was 12 years old a friend did talk to me about a game during a class, and he told me to play it together when we arrive home. So I did download the game, and I did download the game server. Without knowing that in that specific moment, my life will change forever. I did play for first time Minecraft in my own server, and I used all my previous knowladge from the Habbo project to publish it on online forums. In no time I started to have a small player base asking for new features, and I was absolutely fascinated with the game.

In no time I become one of the largests spanish speaking Minecraft servers and I had to develop my own plugins and gamemodes for the server. This is when I learned Java, linux, load balancing, etc. And when I belive my journey as a software engineer did beging.

During almost my entire life, I have been doing code. From personal projects to work related projects. But I want to leave my signature in what I do, I want to remember what did. This could be even one of my obbsessions Maybe no one will see what did, but I will.

For this reason almost all my projects are documented in a way it will be easy to understand, and sometimes, dependeing from the project, understood even by non tech people.

For ilustration, here is one perfect example of a project I did during a weekend, that makes me remember it with love. And also, makes me able to explain how I did it to my friends or anyone that could have interest on it.

I present you to my keys-in-door-experiment project, a system I build to stop forgetting about my keys on my apartment door's outside. You can read more about in the repository. But basically it's a RTSP connection to a security camera checking if the keys are in specific cordinates with a simple and non machine-learning code.

Sometimes, I even add animated gifs to my README files to explain things even better, such as go-gta-sa-driver a library I build for driving a car inside the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

You can check other of my public projects on my GitHub page.
Where you will find many other projects with love written README files.

To be continued...