My own journey
Tags: career
Published: 2019-08-19 04:50:08

I mentioned on another post I just turned 5 at [iTexico](https://www.itexico.com/) (🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉), which is my current job. 

That in itself has been an awesome experience, and as I was thinking about writing a post about it; I also wanted to share stuff I have been remembering lately and reflecting upon. Things that were prior to my time at iTexico.

So, this will be a rather long story because I just realized there are so many things I want to tell you from my experience in becoming the dev I am now, and if you don't mind reading about the technical and nerdy life of some random dude, let's go ahead!

# Let me tell you a story . . .

It all started on a 286 just like [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYQFvT9oqo), though the one at home had an amber monochrome CRT monitor that looked like [this](http://keithlynch.net/pics/vt420.jpg).

I was in High School, and even though there were more modern computers out there, (the Pentium 4 processor was a thing by then) there was just no way at home we would get a new computer. 

# THE aha! moment

My first program ever was written in [Turbo Pascal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZQCXXhXq6Q): I was following a book written in Spanish from Spain, so it had the "ficheros" and "ordenador" and all that good stuff. (This will only be relevant if you call them "archivos" and "computadora" like myself) but I digress. What was it about? I hear you say. Well, let me tell you: it would first ask for your name, then your height; if you were shorter than certain height you would not be eligible for the basketball team, otherwise you'd be welcome to enroll. Okay okay, maybe not exactly, but what was relevant at that moment, the thing that perhaps most of us who have programmed anything at any given moment in our lives and what I can really remember is **the feeling of empowerment**.

> "I can make the computer do whatever I wanted it to!!!!" "What is this magic power I have in my hands?!" I felt really happy that afternoon.

# More about my High School time

Later on, my uncle bought for us an [HP Pavilion 8750](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HP_PAVILION_8750.JPG) so we could do better at school (I will be forever thankful for my extended family and how they have always cared about us) and I learned a bit of C using [Turbo C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Turbo_C). 

A professor of mine wanted me to start using Linux, so he handed me the 6(?) installation CDs for the [Red Hat Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux) distro (This is right before they discontinued it and the Fedora distro existed). So I spent a whole afternoon (yep, you read that right, it was a bit of a slower process to install Linux on your computer at the time) re-tracing the steps my teacher showed me earlier at one of the computers from the lab, but on the HP machine at home. 

I was learning sooo much!! This was very exciting and I also will forever be grateful for mentors who encourage you to go the extra mile and get out of your comfort zone. 

I also learned some [Corel Draw 10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CorelDRAW) back then, but I will leave that for another time.

Worked a bit on [Visual Fox Pro 6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro) and learned that you could also store stuff, and the "ahh, so this is how those [Point Of Sale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_sale) systems are made!" came. Pretty cool stuff.

I got in touch with _event driven programming_ with [Visual Basic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic) and wrote 1 or 2 school projects there. 

This was getting more and more interesting. I knew by this moment that I wanted to work on stuff like this professionally. I remember one teacher asking us if we had decided on our Bachelor's and I was pretty sure I wanted to become an Engineer (Computer Engineer, Systems Engineer... there wasn't a Software Engineer available at the time, I don't think).

Not sure what would have happened to me if I was introduced and encouraged to other stuff I kind of liked at the time, like drawing or music and stuff. But anyhow, this is what life looked like for me and I was digging it!