Introduction

Hello! Welcome back—this is the first post of this humble (and pretty) blog.

Let me start by introducing myself: Nice to meet you! My name is Vinicius José, I’m 23 years old as of the date of this post, and I’ve been a software developer for 2 and a half years (I got my first job in June 2023). My first contact with programming was in a local “computer basics” course in my city. The course was called “Geração Web” and the class was the first one (if I’m not mistaken). I joined it when I was around 12 years old (7th grade).

I remember it like it was yesterday: in the course we first learned the basics of a computer, the difference between software and hardware, Windows windows, browsers, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on. I’ve always liked messing with computers, and for that time it would’ve been really cool to learn all of that—if I didn’t already know 80% of the entire course (lol).

I learned how to use almost everything the course taught long before I even enrolled. After all, I joined when I was 12, but I had already been “messing around” on the computer since I was 7, when I finally got my first computer. But without internet access—I only got internet about 2 years after getting that first PC.

At the beginning, I did what any good kid would do: I poked around in everything. I started on Windows XP, which came installed with some little games like 3D Pinball, which at the time I thought was incredible. Shortly after, my cousin installed a PS1 emulator that—believe it or not—didn’t have saves. The games were on DVDs; I’d put them in the computer’s drive and the emulator would run them. I always played, but I rarely finished games because when the PC turned off, I lost all my progress. Even so, the next day I’d go back and start over again, happy as could be. I thought that was amazing!

I spent some time like that, but soon my parents got neighborhood internet. It was 1MB download and half that for upload, and from then on the world became infinite in my eyes. The possibilities were so many that I didn’t even know where to start. But soon I found myself watching full episodes of Dragon Ball Z on YouTube (I never managed to watch them all on TV Globinho, lol). From there it was history: Orkut, Facebook, MU Online, DDTank, AQW, Fazendinha Feliz, Dragon City, and so on.

Off-topic: I also burned videos to generic DVDs with Nero (miss you, Nero) and copied music to pen drives to make a little money.

Back to the course story: I only got 10s because I already knew almost everything the course taught, since it was what I had learned on my own at home on my PC. Almost everything.

The final 20% of the course was about programming—and that’s when things got crazy, because it was something I didn’t know. It was genuinely new to me.

We started learning programming logic through games. I remember playing an Angry Birds one where you basically had to program the birds’ steps. It may sound silly, but later on I was grateful to have started learning logic that way.

Then we followed the standard path those courses usually take: Portugol, Pascal.

After that, we had HTML and CSS classes (no JavaScript at the time). That part was cool too, even though I don’t remember much about it.

Until the last subject, which was the real final boss: Java.

Yes—in a single module of a “course” we “learned” Java. We had around 20 hours of Java in total, and of course I didn’t really learn anything—at most how to write a “Hello World”.

Even though that last part was a bit frustrating because I didn’t learn anything, it was basically the final stretch of the course, so it kind of didn’t matter.

A few years later I enrolled in technical high school in a Systems Development program. Right at the beginning of high school I went back to studying programming because it was something I had enjoyed in the earlier course—but this time I started my “self-taught” journey.

I started learning Python, and at the time my thinking was: “I’m going to master one language.” And that was actually a good idea—still valid for beginners today.

Remember when I said I learned programming logic by playing that Angry Birds game? So, the logical thinking I developed back then made learning Python really easy for me (not that Python is hard, but it helped a lot anyway).

I started by buying a Udemy course and learned from there. I also remember doing a ton of logic exercises—probably more than 100, easily.

I still remember the exercises I used: https://exercicios.dunossauro.com.

Back then those same exercises were at exercicios.python.brasil.org or something like that. Either way, it was a lot of logic exercises, and they were separated by topics, which made me “gamify” my progress.

In the end, Python was my first language I actually learned for real, while I was still in high school.

The continuation of this story is a few months after finishing high school—when I went to my first Python job and got humbled because I didn’t know a damn thing.

But that’s already the chapter “First job as a dev”. I’ll leave that for another future post, lol.

This blog will be for technical content, life stories, and anything related to the dev world. Make yourself at home!

See you next time!