Where I'm coming from
I have always thought of my childhood as fairly typical if not dull. But it recently dawned onto me that it was in fact quite fascinating.
My dad is a software engineer. He studied the Soviet version of computer science in the 70s. When I was born he was working in a bank. But the bank went bust in the early 90s so he with a few friends started their own firm. They were building warehouse automation software for factories.
My favourite toy was Lego Technic. But I found it boring to follow the manual. I preferred to build cars that didn't exist before. Each would take weeks of trial and error but the resulting designs I liked way more than the stock ones. They used less parts and had more features. Through the shared interest in Lego I met my best friend. At primary school we'd sketch designs during the classes and spend breaks building at the back desk.
I got a PC at home when I was 4 or 5. It was a desktop running DOS. I didn’t know how to use it, needed my dad to load a floppy disk. I couldn’t stop playing games — Packman, Prince of Persia and later Descent which I got totally addicted to. My parents had to remove the machine and I did not have a PC at home until I was 15.
So I started frequenting my dad's office. He would often work late, I would stay too. He was coding and I was poking with the PCs. There were no games though. My first fascination was drawing with Paint. I liked making graffiti-like things in large letters. I figured how to imitate layers by copy-pasting and moving things around. Then someone showed me Photoshop.
Playing with pictures became my lasting obsession. Once I made a poster of the Earth with a keyboard and some digits, called "Hacking the Earth". I emailed it to the editor of a then-popular Russian tech blog. Getting a response felt so great!
Then I started poking with Windows. The computers in my dad’s office were running Windows 98. I was curious how it worked under the hood and tried to customise things. System files, registry, services and so on. Once I sneakily tried to install a game onto one of the office PCs. It needed a newer version of DirectX. I got it somewhere and copied the libraries straight into the system32 directory, overwriting everything. That broke the machine and took a lot of trickery to recover from.
Windows tweaking grew into a hobby of making custom optimised Windows builds. Friends would ask me to fix their computers and I would come with a CD. Their PCs would run noticeably faster because my custom build had most of the "unnecessary" services off. They were always surprised that I could just type in the correct Windows key from memory. But it was much easier to memorize than to carry around since I was doing it so often.
Visual Basic was the first programming language I tried. My dad showed it to me roughly around the time when I exhausted the possibilities of Paint. I didn't like Visual Basic but I liked Photoshop. Then my best friend learned about HTML and we both got excited. It was the best of both worlds – programming but actually visual, unlike Visual Basic. He had a PC at home and we'd often spend nights building things like our school's website.
Then we discovered Flash and ActionScript. That was next level compared to HTML at the time. You could program animations! Someone in a local Internet cafe told us about some competition of interactive presentations. We signed up without thinking much. That turned out to be the EU-wide JoinMultimedia student competition, and we were one of the few teams from Belarus. The pressure was on, we kinda had to learn Flash now.
I all but moved to my friend's house, we were building all nights long and sleeping during the day. It was 2005, ActionScript 2 just came out and it was object-oriented. I only had a book on C++ but it somehow helped, and we shipped our first product on time. We didn't win anything but it was great fun and we participated the next year too.
Once at high school I needed to do a presentation. The idea of using PowerPoint I discarded right away as too lame. I obviously needed to build a new presentation engine. I called it "n-gine". It was written in Action Script 3 and used external configuration. You could make a new deck, define screens and animations by simply editing an XML file without ever opening Flash. Clearly much better than PowerPoint.
"What do I want to be" was never really a question. In my final year of school I wrote a letter to my future self. They were working at Google. That seemed the coolest thing in the world to me back then.
