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What did you go in for?
Being Black
Spent a lot of time on the internet growing up as I bet most of us did.
First I started out with GameMaker 8 and a little bit of Visual Basic. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing but I would watch youtube tutorials all day long and try to make stuff. I did succeed in making a few platform style games with cool particle effects and Eminem songs blasting in the background
That kinda got boring for me around the time Geohot came out with the PS3 jailbreak. That brought me into community forums where I had to find the stuff I needed to host COD MW2 challenge lobbies.
Then I started playing around with vBulletin and learning about security/vulnerabilities, after that I was more interested in servers, hosting, and security for some reason more than gaming. Learned a little bit of PHP, Used to host random PHP things on 000webhost (things like screenshot uploading, vbulletin instances, basically I spent a lot of time waiting on Filezilla). Learned HTML/CSS/PHP along the way. What really brought me into realizing I could really make a career out of IT/tech and make money is my high school video teacher who let me design and host the video studios website after somebody told him I was a "hacker" (b/c they used to join my challenge lobbies lol). That just gave me a huge confidence boost
Then I got a part time job at a local IT company installing/debugging office hardware, and a little bit of server management, actually got that job through someone I found on a forum that lived near me. After that experience (about 6 years or so ago) while in high school and going into college I got a job at a local hosting company doing support. I learned a LOT about linux and hosting through that experience.
lmao
Game, porn, yahoo mail..
These three things drag me here
something about genuine interest gets a kid to learn the ins and outs of something for sure, css & gmod were the shit.
my gmod community consisted of darkrp, deathrun, and ttt.
our deathrun was the most popular, we had multiple packed servers but our darkrp was the most profitable (also most time consuming).
used to host it on an NFO dedi.
Started with aternos.org, I've had a free Minecraft server with them. Once needed help so I went onto their discord for it. Found a dude, and after he helped me solve my problem, I got invited into his discord server. Later on, when he went to college he started working on a payment processor which was to compete with Paypal. He worked on it pretty hard and had rich parents. He still most likely has 4 servers in his basement (all paid by his parents) and also he had an ETH miner (before staking wasn't a thing). I decided that I wanted to create a website for myself with him (rafalblog.xyz but in HTML + CSS) and had a plan with him (1.25 USD p/m for like 2 GB) and I've had it for like good 3 months. Afterwards, he introduced me to Contabo, and I've decided to buy VPS S SSD, and there was no promo from which I didn't have to pay set-up fees. And that's where it all started. (later on, I've gotten myself somehow to LET, and got in an argument with him.)
I was 4y old and was able to play games on my own using floppy disks and MS-DOS
(Dos SHELL quick after). This put my life on IT road i guess. I've played also on Windows 3.1, 95, 98, etc. We had ORB disks also ahah!
At 10y old i've joined IRC for first time, i took a name like "dickhead" but people were friendly to me. I got moderator status few hours later "to test" on a public channel from a "radio star". This caused some trouble to the guy who gave me op status ahah but it was fun and i did nothing bad (anyway i didnt knew this system), few months ago i've learned about mIRC.
15y old i've "worked" for free for a non profit organization, repairing computers, organizing LAN, etc. I've also made my own mIRC scripts with their embedded language (was so happy to be able to listen music from my mIRC client xD). It's also here i've understood that i was not playing games a lot on computer but making a lot of game servers, Counter-Strike mostly in the past. I was always on servers hosting or any technical stuff, never playing games.
17y old i had my first "jail" on FreeBSD, hosting my first IRC server (UnrealIRCd + Anope, Dreams IRCd 1y later i think). Also hosted IceCast server for a friend (the friend works now for radios lol).
Mom got me a 66Mhz Pentium. Then upgraded it to 300Mhz Pentium 2 and got me a dial-up 33.6kbps modem. I was soon exploiting Windows based computers via a trojan that was known as "Deep Throat". I can't recall doing much more than opening/closing people's CD-ROM drives and showing them error messages, calling them with ugly names. This must have been mid 90s and I must have been roughly 10 years old. Ubuntu came around and Canonical sent me over 3 CDs with Ubuntu 5.04. I never looked back at Windows after that and what followed is too long to post here.
my grandfather volunteered at a hardware thrift store.
sometimes i did some work there for him and could pickup stuff to build computers. For example, when I was 10 years old, I built my own gaming pc. A year later I built a server specifically for a minecraft server for friends. And that's how it got out of hand
In 2013 I had my own minecraft server hosted by another hosting company where I experienced many problems with 100+ players. I decided to hang my own server in the datacenter. I had a lot of space left over that I rented out to friends. At this point, I decided to get into the hosting world. and now we host more than 4TB of ram for minecraft servers and alot of colocations.
We thought it was dialing a toll-free number but ended up with $318 phone bill the first month.
Was jealous of my friend when he showed me his wap site on a free wap builder called xtgem.com,
Ended up being a corporate slave writing spaghetti code, just like @jmgcaguicla haha
What?
When I was a 11 I got kicked out of school and ended stalking this fit American in an MSN chat room called Nerds and Nerdettes. I got into MIRC to annoy people and show off in front of her, this got me interested in all aspects of I.T. Year before this happened I had just discovered a the start menu on Windows 98.
When I left school went to college done a HND in software development, am 33 now not my main income but still a big interest. This brings back memories of my first upgrade to getting excited about a P4 with HT technology lol.
When I was 10, a friend of mine came over and installed GTA: San Andreas on the family computer. We played for a good few hours and then he left and took the CD with him. Next day I wanted to play and the game asked for the disc. I knew what "cracking" was but I didn't have the .exe to overwrite the original, so I started looking for it online and miraculously downloaded a clean .exe. I felt like a hacker already.
Later on, I played with a bit of .vbs "viruses", like opening and closing the CD tray, getting Windows XP to open a scary shutdown window with a timer by killing svchost.exe, and I was playing SA:MP, a multiplayer mod for San Andreas. You could program it with PAWN, so I started learning it and writing little scripts here and there and also homehosted my own server.
Later on, I migrated to Multi Theft Auto, which is another multiplayer mod and it used Lua, so I learnt Lua and LOVED it. Still love it, really, so easy and forgiving. I tried making websites, used Wordpress and downloaded HTML templates, hosted on 000webhost (which a few other people have mentioned already).
I played with websites, Metin2 server hosting, programming applications in Visual Basic, then went on to university and learnt everything again, properly.
Like so many others I got my start playing quake about 20 years ago and eventually started a game server provider around 2003. In 2006 I started ColoCrossing.com.
For me started late, didn't get my first computer until 2nd year of university at 19yrs old and only used it for course work until 22/23. 24 when I ventured into online forums which changed my life - started working at vBulletin/Jelsoft for over a decade helping forum users scale their LEMP/LAMP server setups to handle high concurrent user loads and squeeze out the most performance for a given server configuration. Worked with some of the largest community forums on the internet over the years
Then after started my own server optimisation consulting and poured that knowledge into developing my own LEMP stack = Centmin Mod LEMP stack for optimal performance and scalability. Centmin Mod now powers at least 10% of the largest Xenforo forums on the internet and a lot of high traffic sites including Alexa Top 5000/10000 and yeah there's even quite a few large porn/adult sites too apparently!
Even HTTP Archive's new Core Web Vital Technology report has tracked quite a few Centmin Mod site origins compared to common control panels, distros, cdns and web servers https://community.centminmod.com/threads/http-archive-core-web-vitals-technology-report-google-datastudio-dashboard.21627/#post-89608
Everything I do still is for the quest for more performance ^_^
Toy with php duing my secondary school -> Finished my bachelor in accounting -> work -> back to college got my second bachelor in computer science.
Used my 1st PC in 4th grade, I thought it was marvelous. It was a computer on my uncles' office and you could count in 1 hand all the PCs in our town at the time so I was only able to use it whenever noone's using it when I visited his office (which was extremely rare). Freshman year HS, internet was introduced in our town but was too expensive to rent ($4/hour). My mom wasn't always present because she always liked to go out with friends, was left alone with money to spend so I guess I was the only kid on the lone internet cafe available in town at the time. IRC was the rave with employed adults at the time, they always chat on IRC after work so I also spent my time on IRC. Obsessed with getting @ status and it all started from there. Bots, scripting, and one thing led to another.
After being in the karting club during my 3rd grade, where we learned about the engine in a class (without actually touching an engine), but just once at the end of the year actually riding a kart with gas brought from home (fun times in a post-communist country), I heard about the computer science club and that they are playing computer games all day.
So I switched to CS club in the 4th grade. We learned about PLOT, DRAW and CIRCLE instructions in BASIC on a HC-80 computer (a Sinclair-Spectrum compatible machine with Z80 CPU). Went home and draw a truck with instructions on paper. When I tested the program in the club, I had one mistake: one line was diagonal instead of horizontal. The teacher saw it and put me in the competition team and I never got to play, not even once, in the next four years.
All my following 30 years have been related to IT, especially software development.
PS: I still don't care at all about cars. They just need to take me from A to B and have enough luggage space.
GeoCities, AngelFire, Tripod, etc. Had some cool BMX websites when I was a teen.
I knew you were affiliated with CC but I never knew you founded it.
back in the day in 2008 or 2012, I was setting up servers and websites for customers on fiverr (maybe ?) for 5 usd . Thats how I started
The mention of ".com" makes it sound like he just started the website, not the business.
Yep, that's me!
I owned ColoCrossing until 2018 when I sold it to Deluxe.
Well it all started when back in 93 with Linux kernel 1.2.13 using slackware distro. I remembered having spent days and alot of floppies to download disk images to get started with the basic system running. That was running on 486 computer. Which I started messing with c/c++. Then in 97 I started working at a ISP and started programing in perl. In turn I wrote the linux scripts for our in house billing system. Then 2000s i worked for oil field exploration companies maintaining the electronics and software on submersibles. Then today I work from home in the middle of no where I recoding things from cobalt to node.js and php.
Dad bought a PC XT so he could teach C, Pascal, Fortran and Cobol. Between the ages of 5-6 I would mostly play games on it. I started Basic programming at 7. Then, learnt C as a hobby.
In 2009, used to mod roms for HTC Desire, and used to have a fan following at XDA developers for my SuperNova ROM. Did some dabbling in kernel source code modifications at the time, and built a cross compiler toolchain and other tools which I could run on Sourceforge's shell and build my roms.
Now, even though my profession is completely different (am a Surgeon), I still spend time on my passion. I created a electronic health record software, MyOPIP for my own use, using Python, and have a few paying customers who use it for a clinics. Now, formed a startup for it. I don't have any employees, and it's still a hobby.
Keep learning a new language every few months. Fairly proficient in Python, Flutter/Dart, Javascript(/Vue.js), with some occasional dabbling in shell scripts, perl and C.
Old timer!!
486, nice!
Back in mid 90s when I first met the CRT desktop with C programming... run and syntax error and then running again....
2000 my first IT company ( that's how I found out that I need a diploma to be able to run a company - law from 1800 in Germany -blacksmith's law
)
In 2000 -2004 degree in informatics ( Computer Science )
2006 back to Romania , 2008 first IT company in Romania ( DC services, hardware-software services ) , 2010 first hosting service