1/4/2000 to 1/4/2025: the beginning

Today April, 1st 2025 marks the 25 years anniversary (quarter of a century sounds more impressive, doesn't it?) working professionally in ICT.

My first working day as an ICT professional was on April 1st 2000. I had just graduated from uni (literally the week before) and one of the profs offered me a position at this company.

The daily commute over bus and train was about one hour and a half, but I got to work on something really fancy: writing a c-shell script to daily sync data over ftp from an Oracle 7 database running on AIX (looked a lot like this one) to a Bull mainframe. Development occurrent from a Windows NT4 workstation over telnet (I think). c-shell was a b1tḉh to work with and vim wasn't available (only vi IIRC) so my productivity wasn't great but I got it done and it ran until one of the two system (AIX) was eventually decommissioned.

The AIX system might still be in the basement at my $OLDJOB.

After that I moved on to more interesting endeavours: running dns (djbdns) on Linux, and then other things. My commute got shorter, but mostly because I started driving.

But this is not meant to be a walkthrough of all the interesting (or not) stuff I did, instead I just want to use it as a hook to explain why I got into computers and advice I would give to my younger self.

The first part I already covered it in an earlier post and it essentially boils down to instinctively realizing the immense potential for good of the Internet, wanting to be a part of it, and make a living out of it. Thinking of it, it's amazing how much satisfaction I got from following my instincts.

And that gets to the advice to my younger self, which you'll have to distill from this Canva presentation I made last year for an internal event at $CURRENTJOB. The presentation was very well received and many people reached out afterwards to express how much it resonated with them.

Hope it does with you too, and if you want, I'd love to hear your thoughts!


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