0xfenion

My first computer arrived when I was six or seven: a Windows XP desktop I had no idea what to do with, and a modem that dialled out in that two-note handshake screech — the one you either recognise instantly or were born too late to have heard. My father kept telling me to learn the computer language. At that age it sounded like homework.

At twelve I found a reason. The sites I used were missing things I wanted, so I wrote to their support teams — and learned quickly that nobody builds what a child asks for. Then I remembered my father’s advice, looked it up, and hit the first hard fact: there is no such thing as the computer language, there are hundreds of them. What I found instead was userscripts. With one I could add anything I liked to any site, whether its owners agreed or not.

That is how JavaScript and I met — not through a book or a course, but through something I wanted to exist and no idea how to build it. Four or five working userscripts later, having read Stack Overflow and MDN dry and tripped over everything in between, I knew I liked this. So I kept going: plain HTML and CSS, then jQuery, then a detour through Java and C# because I played Minecraft and wanted to see inside it. I wrote my own launcher for a modpack.

PHP paid at the time — most of what sold on freelance boards was built on it — but JavaScript pulled me back. Node, the frontend frameworks, and work that started as page-builder sites and grew into React front ends wired into clients’ existing systems: more room than a builder gave them, without cutting them off from what they already ran. That was the job until I was twenty-one.

Then a year in the army, where I kept writing code on a compiler app on my phone — small functions, text games, anything to keep my hands in. I came out and joined a freight company as its only developer. What happened after that is the timeline.