The first 18 years, tech perspective

“I am a tech guy.” But what does that even mean?

People often make fun of this phrase, it sounds pretentious, like you're trying to say everything and nothing at the same time. As if you want to sound cool more than actually communicate something real.

But to me, it actually makes sense. It's like saying “I'm an artist” or “I'm an athlete,” as long as what you mean is that it's your passion, not just your job.

My first memories related to technology go back something like 20-24 years ago, when my father, who is a mechanical engineer, used to take me with him to the office. While he was in meetings, I would draw on those big squared paper sheets that every meeting room had back in the day, before they got replaced by displays and smart boards.

On those big sheets, I used to draw floor plans, mostly top views of spaceships, with detailed layouts of compartments, generator rooms, wall thickness, magnetic shields, and movement corridors.

Other times I drew cross-sections of underground bases, with missile launch tunnels, or even systems of transatlantic cable cars between Europe and the US, powered by electromagnetic rays instead of cables.

Part of me misses that creativity. You know, as kids our imagination has no limits, but when we grow up, we start overthinking everything. Maybe someone should invent a machine that collects all those childhood ideas and feeds them to an LLM, maybe we'd reach the next scientific breakthrough faster than just scraping low-quality web content.

I come from a small town in the Po Valley, and 20 years ago it wasn't exactly the most advanced place when it came to technology. But I still remember the day my father gave me my first computer. He bought it at a second-hand electronics fair, just a normal desktop, nothing special.

But from that moment, my real love for computers started. I spent hours in front of the screen, learning things, some more legit than others. How to recover deleted files from hard drives (I quickly discovered the previous owner hadn't really erased anything), how to browse the dark web, how to connect remotely to my school's computer… and also more useful stuff, like how to make a website.

And that's where my second big passion was born: web development.

At that time there weren't all the (probably too many) choices we have today in terms of libraries and frameworks. It was just HTML, CSS, and PHP. I found this software that let you visually build e-commerce websites, it was called Website X5. Back then, it felt magical. But the thing that really helped me was that it allowed you to see and export the generated code, both frontend and backend in PHP.

That's how I started learning and experimenting, and soon I built my first website: Green Future Engineering.

It was a consulting website, gradients in PNG (CSS didn't support them yet), 3D Flash elements (now banned 😅), and a page that loaded books dynamically from a database. Nothing fancy.

I was around 11 or 12 at the time, and until the start of high school I kept having fun building websites and cracking videogames.

Then everything changed when I started working on Mockuper, but that's a story for another post.

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