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My personal journey

Below I am going through the main milestones in my early life that led me to love computers and became a software engineer:

  • Late 80's-early 90's (~6-7 years): My first contact with computers started when my older brother was given an Amstrad CPC with which we spent hours playing computer games like Ghosts'N Goblins, Contra, Double Dragon, Shadow Warriors, etc.

  • ~1991-1992 (~8 years old): My father bought an i486 and I had to learn how to use using MS-DOS, Norton Commander, etc. Although the main thing I did at that time was to keep playing games like Doom and Duke Nukem.

  • ~1993 (~9 years old): Windows 3.11 came out, and among other programs I spent many hours with my cousin talking to HERBIE, an amazing conversational chatbot (made by Rafael García González in 1985) that felt like ChatGPT these days, but also creating movies with "Cartooners" which remind me a rudimentary version of Scratch nowadays.

  • ~1995 (~11 years old): My brother, with the help of a book, taught me how to develop in BASIC using QBasic. Inspired by the role-playing games we used to play together, I created my first choose your own adventure game type, based on IF, ELSE, GOTO and a few more statements (a nightmare!! 🤣... and full of bugs).

  • ~1996 (~12 years old): My father brought a modem (28.8k) home. I still remember how, before discovering Lycos, my cousin and I thought that the whole internet was just a single website (elguebon.com) where we spent hours chatting with other users through Netscape. This fascinated me... and a couple of years later it would lead me to want to learn how to make webs.

  • ~1997 (~13 years old): I met a guy older than me (from Seville) who had just started to study computer science and who spent the summer vacations in Nerja, the town where I grew up. He taught me the Delphi language, and although I tried my best at creating a Doom-like game, I never got very far.

  • ~1998 (~14 years old): I discovered Microsoft Frontpage and started building web pages, familiarizing myself with HTML, adding basic styles with CSS, layout with tables, very basic Javascript, and ActiveX controls. Everything got more interesting when a classmate (Chema) taught me how to create animations with Macromedia Flash and ActionScript. I started publishing them in Geocities.com and Tripod.com a year after.

  • ~1999 (~15 years old): We were taught to program with Pascal in high school, although I didn't do much with it. Around that time in addition to MSN Messenger, I discovered Terra & IRC, and joined IRC-Hispano where I met an ethical hacker that taught me what trojans were, specifically Sub7, and how to use it (for joking around), told me about keyloggers, showed me how to hide text in images using steganography software, ... But also, at the same time and influenced by my brother, I started playing StarCraft, and where my nickname comes from (@hhkaos), because I was [HH]KaoS at the HH (Hell Hounds) clan.

  • Late 2001 (~17 years old): One of my brother's friends told me about HackHispano.com, and how he was able to make a Slimcard that allowed him to do free calls from phone booths. This aroused my curiosity, and I learned how to do it too. I made very good friends there, who among other things... introduced me to Red Hat Linux.

  • ~2002 (~18 years old): After doing the Selectividad (the Spanish University admission tests), I decided that I would do computer engineering in the University of Granada, where it was not yet clear to me what I would specialize in next, but from my second year of studies, it was clear to me that what I liked the most was web development.

    Note: Here is a video that not only shows me how the popularity of web pages has evolved since 1993-2022, but also reminds me of how old I am getting... 👴🏻🤣.

Adult stage​

I will continue adding milestones about my professional development and the different stages I have been going through. For now, you can check my Linkedin profile