Hi, my name is Marius Vatasoiu
First Years
Well, it's hard to tell how I got this passion for programming. I know I was fascinated by computers. My first contact was when I was 9. It was love at first sight. I still remember the Volfied game. For many years I was curious about the hardware behind it. With every chance, I was happy to disassemble a computer.
Years have passed, and then I got in contact with the internet. Immediately I saw it as a new dimension with endless possibilities. I think the first websites I discovered were Google, Yahoo, a site with flash games, and YouTube.
In high school, I learned about Pascal and just a little bit of HTML. The former was more interesting for me, but still didn't click, because I didn't have the bigger picture - how you get from a simple local file called index.html to a website that can be accessed by other people.
I did four years of Pascal, and I've never understood how it's useful. All I did was write some small programs where you open it, enter two numbers from the keyboard, and then the sum was displayed. At the end, "Press any key to exit..." message (or something like this) was shown. That's it! Every time I had the same question in my head: "How is this helpful? How can I make it real?". Never got the answer.
In the same period, I remember watching movies like Antitrust, and I was always amazed by them. They felt so inspiring, and this specific movie, I think it had a lot of influence over me, maybe more than I realized back then. Also, I loved math and still do. It might seem unrelated, but they were for me.
College
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The movie made me curious/intrigued about this domain, and the math made me start the first project. But before starting with that story, let me tell you how I chose my college.
I was at the point where I loved math and physics, but I was also intrigued by programming. Math always felt natural to me (thanks to my math teacher from middle school). Programming felt weird, but the idea behind it was interesting. So, I chose a college based on math and physics. It was easier. It was the safe bet.
In college, I had more free time. At least, this is how I felt. I got the idea to create a website for math. A place where teenagers can find examples for entrance exams, where they can ask questions and all sorts of math-related things. And just like that, in the fall of 2009, I started googling. I searched day and night, and read every article I found, from how I create a page to how I put it online.
I did this for weeks, and every time I said, OK, this is good enough, two days later, it wasn't. Constantly I felt that I could improve it. At some point, I put it online, but it was too late. I was trapped in the world of web development. Really fast, I thought I should do this for others, so I started to build a new website to promote my services. That's how I met PHP, and once again, I was amazed by its power.
The first project
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After almost one and a half years after I started, I had enough courage to apply for some project-based jobs. I got one job for building small presentation websites with a basic CMS. I had to build everything from the ground, and it was hard as hell. I was already working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. All these technologies without doing a single course or reading a single book.
That is how I earned my first money from web development. I built more than ten websites, they weren't great, but they worked (I still have the files). It was also the first time I put my college in second place for a while. I had to build the websites in two-three days. I barely slept that period. But I loved it! I was creating things that other people could use.
For the next two years, I kept learning and searching for projects. Jumping between exams and projects was hard. I remember reading a book about CodeIgniter in my class but still trying to get notes about the course. Or the moment when I studied in my college building until 03:00 A.M. and got home to finish a website until 07:00 A.M. At 08:00 A.M. I was back to college for an exam which I passed it. Four hours later, I was talking in my sleep about Fourier transforms. But finally, I graduated!
The first full-time job
And once again, I had to choose what shall I do next. This time I didn't want the safe bet. I chose web development because it gave me joy and satisfaction. It was a risk knowing I had to throw four years of college. But I did. I got a job as an intern a few days after graduation, and from that day to this day, I didn't have a single moment when I didn't like what I was doing. After 6 months as an intern, I became a full-time employee.
I also did a master's in the next two years. I had this sort of a promise to myself that I'll finish my education phase no matter what. I chose the same field as my college because I didn't find anything good about web development. I knew it wouldn't help me, but I still did it while working as a web developer.
Next steps
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After graduation, I finally knew I could focus 100% on web development. And that's what I did. I've constantly read books, done online courses, read articles, and so on.
Fast forwarding, I changed a few jobs and switched from full-stack developer to frontend developer so I could focus on fewer things.
And that's all folks! This is my short story related to web development. If I could go back in time, probably I would change a few things, but those things I will share in a different article. That's what I'm planning to do with this blog, to share my personal views about this world of web development - what and how I learned, what mistakes I've done, and what I'm playing around with.