A young Moroccan, I got to know programming at the age of 16, and that was after I met someone and from there the story began
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Some 20 years ago my father took me to a book fair. At the time, I thought books were boring.
But computers were cool so we decided to look at computer books.
There was a big shiny new book called Visual Basic 6 Bible, which caught my eye and promised to be simple for newcomers. It had great step by step tutorials, with screenshots printed much like online tutorials do to this day. Back then internet access was scarce and you could only find tutorials like that in books.
I did not understand any of the underlying principles of what I was doing, but the book was so well written that I was able to produce a simple GUI desktop app which I could then customize and play around with.
Shortly after that book, a local magazine called Bug published a number with “Office pranks” apps. These were basically trojan horse malware that you installed to play pranks on friends on coworkers. Security was not much of a thing back then. I remember that windows shipped with the first firewall, you could just disable it from your VB6 app like it’s nothing. I think this was not fixed until Vista and UAC.
Anyway, these were my first programs created and my entry to the craft. The rest is history. I am both very thankful for the Visual Basic book, the Bug magazine and the time my father took me to the book fair. I wish I could tell him this, but sadly it’s not the kind of relationship we have anymore.
I feel that my passions towards software have chosen me, and not the other way around. Had it not been for the book fair, I am 100% sure it would have been something else that gets me into the world.
I have also grown to respect and love books, they are an amazing source of wisdom which are often under looked or simply skipped.