NOTE: I've been here at dev.to some time already, but never actually introduced myself, so Hello World!
I'm Jorge González, I'm (at the time of writing this) currently coursing a Software Engineering degree in Mexico 🇲🇽.
I love to code and play around with new technologies. Mostly, I've been in the Web development world, learning about the
Do's and Don'ts for both the Frontend development and the Backend development. I consider my self a Full-Stack
capable developer.
TL;DR
I'm not new to the internet, I've been around for quite some time, but this is technically my first formal presentation
to the world, and done in a way that web archives can keep for history.
My story
My first approach to technology was when I was around 4-5 years old. I can remember that my grandfather bought a digital
camera, which was, by the time, only available in English. He taught me how to use it to take photos, and since he let
me play with it almost every day, I discovered how to turn on the Sepia and B/W filters, and later on, how to record
video footage. This was definitely the biggest turn point in my whole life.
After 2 years, he also bought a Desktop Computer, and requested internet access from a pretty common Mexican ISP.
With that new computer, he taught me to use Windows Paint, and I got to spend hours trying to draw cars and houses,
but as soon as I got bored, I started exploring the different options, menus and configurations that I could find in
that program, without really knowing what anything was actually, since I was just starting to learn to read and write
in Spanish.
Some time after mastering my circle painting skills, I discovered that the PC had more programs than paint that I could
actually use without blowing up the whole system, being those the File Explorer and the Internet Explorer.
Files are files, right? But... Internet? Wow, that was new to me... I could go in IE and it would open up Google
automatically, and if I typed anything with the keyboard, it would go and search for it in a catalog of items...
I remember that somebody once talked about Encartas for local system dictionary searches, but Google was way more than
that, I could literally type anything and it would result in some matches.
And aunt of mine showed me how I could use Google to get some pretty basic search results in Spanish, so I was able to
Google for Power Ranges, Racing and other random games, as well as to look for news.
The combination of the high neoplasticity of a young me, and the power of the internet allowed me to start accelerating
my learning path, starting of by learning to read and write in English at the same time that I was learning to do so
in Spanish, so I was able to develop my secondary language almost as fast as I was improving my mother language.
Technological news got my attention, I started learning how to actually use the Internet, how to make Google searches,
how to take advantage of Wikipedia to make my homework, and also, to use Youtube just to see those Super Saiyan 50
Goku and Vegeta theories.
Now, back to more relevant stuff...
At the age of 10, I asked myself if it was possible for me to build a website like Google, or like Facebook, just so I
could have miscellaneous stuff in there for other people to watch. So I came across with Jimdo and Wordpress, and they
where really great, but wasn't satisfied with the customization options that they offered me by the time, so I started
googling for tutorials that guided you to make your own Website.
Some years later, I got involved in the PHP world, all because I wanted to write Minecraft: Pocket Edition (Now known as
Bedrock Edition) plugins, and the only software available at the time was
PocketMine-MP. I learnt to use Object Oriented programming and started
developing my very first coding project (which by the way, was Open Source):
EssentialsPE. This was an ambitious project, since I was porting
some of the features from a Java plugin to PHP, and also, I started learning about code optimization and peer-working,
and thanks to Github, I was able to get involved with some other cool developers, and we created the
LegendsOfMCPE (aka LoMCPE) organization, which aimed to develop plugins for PocketMine-MP.
Actually most of the plugin ideas we had, were not able to see the light of a stable release, but the ones that did,
gained quite some popularity in the community. We were able to grow a lot and learn one from another. That was the first
time I experienced the phenomena called globalization by myself.
Time passed, most of those Legends that developed plugins started looking to other life projects, and most of us, started
looking toward further developing our path in the coding world.
If you remember, at the beginning of this post, I was talking about being a capable Full-stack developer, well, my
very first introduction to the Backend land was indeed while programming plugins with the LoMCPE organization,
but I also got some a lot of experience since I got a job years later as a Junior Dev at a Multiplayer Games
Company. That's where I got lots of knowledge on project architecture, API optimization and kind of what is called
Microservices for high availability of our services.
My introduction to the Frontend land was indeed with that company, I was one of the only employees that really liked to
work with PHP, since I worked with it before in some projects, so I was asked to cover the Website developer while he was
away for a week. I remember contacting that developer a week before he went busy, asking him to help me getting familiar
with the structure of the Website. To my surprise, he was actually using a pretty solid PHP Framework, I was expecting
pure-php code, like many tutorials explain for people that just started programming.
Everything went fine, I was able to know how to modify the Website without breaking everything up, deploy it and also create
modules for connecting with our game servers and show an (almost) live count of players currently playing in each of the
games we offered.
I left that company a year later, but full of new knowledge.
Nowadays, I'm further developing my coding skills by maintaining some personal side projects, and working independently
for a Nutritional Center, developing their whole system.
So, this is currently me, but we're just getting started.
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