I played Quake 1 using arrow-keys (since WASD wasn’t the default), built websites in FrontPage ‘98 and wrote CGI programs in Perl. The web felt different back then.
Then pretty quickly I stepped into low-level programming and began writing Assembly for Microchip PIC16x84 and building network utilities in C. I didn’t know that I was doing IoT as there was no hype around it. It was fun.
Unfortunately the hype was all around Web 2.0 and for over a decade I was developing web services and web applications in ASP.NET, eventually falling in love with Ruby on Rails and jQuery followed by an attempt to step into mobile development and writing apps in Objective-C, playing with Python and OpenCV and building vehicle monitoring system.
I never liked web development, but luckily, IoT became the next big thing and my journey there continued. I was working on a Connected Car platform and later joined a startup full of great engineers developing an AI-powered remote care solution. I quickly became passionate about Go; it just felt like a modern C with a runtime.
During those years, in addition to writing code, building distributed systems and tinkering with various things, I dove into DevOps, mastered Kubernetes and watched all the hype around Public Clouds.
One thing I didn’t mention so far is that I’m a big fan of open source. I learned a lot about software engineering by reading source codes of various projects written by different people and I truly believe that by sharing our knowledge and ideas we can make this world a better place.
Luckily I now work at Canonical and building software that turns your data center into a bare metal cloud. For me this is a match made in heaven.
Wait! I should probably have hobbies, right? Yes, that’s all of the above :-)