Hello World! – A Brief History of Time

A few days ago, I answered a question on Quora. I thought it worth sharing! Let me walk you through those first few years of my programming career! Its been a lot of fun!

When did I Start Programming?

I started coding from 2012. It was the year when I enrolled for my Bachelors on Premier University Chittagong My first Computer was a Pentium III desktop with a 15 inch CRT monitor, 80 GB HD and, 512 MB Ram. I used to call it Ancient Karl. I have upgraded it with a brand new mother board, Dual Core CPU, 160 GB HD & 1 GB ram later!

What was My First Programming Language?

I Started with C & a few week later Python. After 1.5 hrs of wrestle, I successfully compiled my first C Program. I didn’t pay attention how things work and jumped right into coding (the way we play video games without reading instruction 😛 ) I was also way too noob for googling solutions for programming problems back then! Hence, I was going through folders of Turbo C to find the proper header (i.e stdio.h). After trying all headers starting with S, I finally managed to run my Hello World Program!

My First Interaction with Linux

There was a guy in my university who used to boot on a different OS from a USB stick on those University desktops! It was kinda cool. Although, I was a introvert so couldn’t ask him about it. Later we became friend and, he told me all about it, It was Ubuntu. He was very fond of Python.

When I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for the first time on my computer. I found python IDLE so amazing! I fall in love with python at first sight. Linux became my primary OS and, python my primary Language ever since.

Competitive Programming

I was introduced with SPOJ at February 14, 2014. I used to like it a lot because, it was the only platform that I knew that time that supports python based problem solving. I started to solve acm programming problems using C++, C & Python.

C++ & C were tough nuts to crack. Yet, used to solve 1 or 2 programs a day. After that, explored Javascript basics along with Java. I quit Java after writing my first applet (Hello World)

Various Projects & Programming Languages that I explored

I switched to C# for developing desktop application. It was cumbersome for me to make desktop app connected via online db. Hence, focused on web programming using PHP (with MYSQL). I didn’t like PHP Syntax was searching for alternatives from Day 1, found a brand new web framework Meteor (it was 0.7 or 0.8) that time. Exploring it learnt a bit more of JS. Never gave up practicing python in the mean time, as it was part of my daily life. Python was so easy and, always resonated my inner thoughts quite well. I used to use python codes more like algorithm/ building blocks. Wrote my first Meteor app Also, met a creepy Language named brainfuck that time which had only 8 commands! Yet, I found it so fascinating wrote a tutorial about it in my native language. I believe brainfuck changed my perspective and developed a new sense of coding. I felt that my thought process has changed!

Instead of solving problems, I started to look for multiple solutions to one problem

Enjoyed matrix manipulation on MATLAB, but found numpy (Python Module) more convenient for me. For text processing I used to be a fan of AWK & SED along with grep. Android devices caught my attention when I enrolled for a National 500 apps Application Developer Trainer Program!

Learnt many new things of Java. Used to code on eclipse that time. Wrote some android apps and, got selected as ICT Certified Trainer among the trainees. Wrote One of my brain teaser app. Meanwhile, started to explore phaser.js another Javascript Framework. Made Flappy Bird clone using that framework. And, another game. I was exploring Django (Python Framework) that time. Functional programming seemed interesting as well, hence ended up learning clisp basics. I started to write more and more python codes and, small django apps.

Another favorite pet project of mine is my Phaser-Piano. You can try it online!

I have played some musics on the app and uploaded them on sound cloud just to have some fun with it!

Feel free to check the full playlist here!