Self Introduction
I’ve been saving all of my notes in the Notes app synced to my iCloud for convenience for many years, I’ve done several cleanups where I delete very old notes that I think they are not worth anymore, but it never occurred to me that those notes can help myself in the future, so I have decided to write about each thing I learn even if it’s small, I’ll will write about my personal projects as well, but I’ll start small.
A little about myself, I have always loved computers and making software for them, my focus has been in mobile and cross-platform development for many years, I recently started to learn about Cryptocurrencies & Blockchain technologies, I have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B running as a Bitcoin miner.
The first computer I every used was in elementary, we inserted 8-inch diskettes to play Oregon Trails in black with green monitors, it was super exciting!
My Dad bought my first computer when I was about 11 years old, I don’t remember the brand or model, it had a turbo button! it looked like the below pictured.
He ended up buying me an HP Pavilion Desktop computer that had Windows 98, it had CD burner! I did put this burner to use with the help of Ares, LimeWire and Napster. ٩(^‿^)۶
I completed a computer basics course, I learned so much that it still helps me, specially for the Windows Command Line and some Office tricks.
Back then, memory USB thumb drives didn’t exist, we had Floppy Disks to transfer information from one computer to another in ~2Mb! Music didn’t fit, but I learned how to lower the size of music files using a tool Cool Edit Pro, the bad part was that I spent so much effort on making it small to fit in the floppy drive to share a single song with my friends at school and later to find out that the drive got dust and stopper working, when thing got corrupted on Floppy Disks it was never obvious it happened in the middle of a copy, ah yes, transferring files from and to floppy disks take a long time (-_-)
I learned so much about computer hardware that I convinced my Dad to buy parts so that I can build my own computer, I installed Windows XP and also started to experiment with many flavors of Linux like Red Hat to SuSe then Fedora, and a lot others.
I started to give maintenance to very slow computers and full of viruses for money, the enjoyment to fix other’s computers started to go down when I burned my motherboard when trying to figure out what was broken on a customer’s computer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The first visual programming language that I learned was Visual FoxPro, I don’t remember the non-visual programming languages learned prior that because it was probably brutal for my brain to learn just by re-typing the teacher’s code from the green board to the computer, or I probably just have a brain fart. (◔_◔)
Then I learned Visual Studio 6, this was awesome! I did so many experiments that my friends told me I knew VB6 more than our own teacher, it was really fun. ᕕ(⌐■_■)ᕗ ♪♬
My first freelancer job was to create a site for a Cafe Internet, got paid $100.
My first office job as a programmer lasted about 2 months I use VB6 for a point of sale system, I don’t know why but I got fired and didn’t get paid a cent, but I learned so much that I created two successful point of sale systems myself.
I created 3 applications to help a well known high school teacher from my hometown to teach his methods using these applications, one was Sumatoria, the other was Grados and lastly Multiplicacion-Polinomios, I have published the code for all of them in GitHub, please don’t judge this code was written when I was just a kid.
Well that was a lot of history, it was fun to remember, I may write a post with newer experiences, but till that happens, be careful out there.
Salvador Guerrero
