The first programming language that I heard of was Delphi. One of the neighbours studied computer science and it was the primary language that they used. However, during their first year, they learned Turbo Pascal and this was his recommendation to start with. In some way unknown to me I got fascinated by the lines of code that harmonically composed a program and made computer to perform different things.

So, finding an old book on Turbo Pascal at a flea market, I started following it through. I advanced to half of the book, when along the way I lost focus. Building a calculator was cool, but it was still too far away from all the cool things that nurtured my initial interest. I was also afraid of all the difficult types of math that my neighbour was telling me about. After all, at this stage, I was around 13 or 14; I dreamed of becoming a lawyer so I shortly shifted focus to social sciences instead.

Looking at this now, I would say that I lacked perspective. I did not know why I needed to learn about all those simple arithmetical operations together with special syntax which made building a calculator such a time-consuming task. It seemed like it had no value practically, because for those simple calculations anybody could just use a handheld calculator. This is what I was thinking.

A few years later the love for coding resurrected, or rather got back from idleness to action – I was in high school and wanted to create a new magazine about gadgets. This was about journalism, writing cool pieces on new cellphones, MP3 players or even smartphones which were making their way to the market. It was not about building a website in itself, even though building a website with a custom template on WordPress turned out to be such a fun task. I spent hours drawing different components in Adobe Flash and later putting images together in a template. It was great fun, but once I was done — it struck me that I actually needed to write content every day, and I was not sure how to write so much content while I have no access to new gadgets which I could write about. So when everything was working on my local machine, I just let the project remain there.

Now, many years later, I go back to that feeling of endless curiosity and fascination that lines of code create. It is again fun to see how the computer performs different tasks and how things are built from nothing to something. On top of that, I always dreamed of taking coding courses at KTH, the engineering school I always highly valued, and it led me first to a course in React, and then a course in C++. This choice may look quite odd for 2025, but I really want to understand fundamentals and C++ seems to be a good way to learn that.