In my teenager years in the 1980s I had a keen interest in computers right from the start. 8-bit computers were the rage and the Atari 600 XL, Commodore 16 and later the Atari 1040 ST held my fascination. A world without the internet severely restricted availability of computer software and games – so I came up with my own. Sometimes this meant resorting to Assembler to just make the sluggish machines just that little bit faster. My friends at the time also had similar machines (Schneider, Spectrum, … ) and more often than not we had programming competitions.
In the 1990s I finished my studies at university (Business) and entered into the IT world. My first job I was technical support for a small translation company in south Germany. That later evolved into linguistic software testing and technical documentation authoring for IBM and Aveva right up until 2010. These were software tests conducted mostly onsite in places such as California, Minnesota, North Caroline, Taiwan, Tokyo, and Germany with a large group of people from all over the world. A great time to be exposed to technology and social interactions too.
At the end of 2002 I started programming in Javascript to make my personal website a bit more interactive (and do all the other cool stuff that Javascript does to web pages). Since 2011 I work at a small documentation and translation company based in the Netherlands.
During the last 15 years I have focused on learning programming languages and technologies in the field: the antiquated Object Pascal (Delphi), C++ for those routines that required maximum processing speed without interaction, C# and VB.NET, PHP for web site back-office operations (talk to the database, feed the API), HTML, Javascript, JQuery, Bootstrap and CSS for front-end visualizations.
My job satisfaction comes from designing software solutions from the initial business case right until the successful implementation. For sure, the path to get there is sometimes rocky as small details need to be worked out or alternative approaches investigated and tested.
Luckily these days, we have the entire coding knowledge of humankind at our finger tips to help us on our way.
