Tynambule

The LOGO Turtle

I’ve met my first computer at the age of six, and at the time, it ran MS DOS. Right from the start, I was amazed by the possibilities offered by the platform. I started by playing shareware games, then I ran a LOGO clone and took control of the legendary turtle. I drew infinite spiral and pseudo-fractal, leafs, squares, chessboards, just for the sake of it. Then I discovered BASIC, and it was the beginning of the end. « Real » programming opened new doors to create stuff. I wrote Tic-tac-toe, insulting teacher name generator, lots of « test » programs, stuff that played annoying sound on the computer speaker, dice rollers, …

At the age of eight, I wrote a TETRIS clone and spent more time playing it than coding it. It was eye opening. Not only programming was fun, but it allowed me to create fun stuff. Double rainbow. I immediately envisioned my future as a game programmer, writing games, playing them, and making buck loads of money (yeah, I also received my first allowance around the time). I pursued my childhood mostly writing useless (but fun to create) programs, learning some C, and ended up discovering the Internet on my 33.6kbps modem.

It looked better at the time.

That’s when I started my teenage years. Around twelve, I created my first website using Frontpage Express, the Notepad and Paint. It was about Fallout 2, and I’m quite proud to say it’s still online, even if I’ve forgotten the identifiers long ago. I also started playing The 4th Coming, an MMORPG hosted on GOA. Not too long after that, I’ve discovered how reverse engineering worked, and wrote pieces of software to cheat on that game, exploiting its huge network vulnerabilities to teleport, move through walls, talk to NPC remotely, …

At fifteen, I finished my mandatory school classes, and was hired as an apprentice at Swisscom. I did very interesting stuff here, like writing a PHP forum, implementing serial communication through COM ports with a custom wired cable, and learned how to manage a network. Also, I experienced some big disappointments, as I discovered that even as an apprentice, I had to go to school one day a week, that the teachers on that school weren’t more fun than the previous ones, and that there was a tremendous amount of homework to do, which was incompatible with my personal occupation. That’s why I dropped after one year out of four.

Swisscom logo

Around the same time, I got hired as a volunteer Webmaster on the JeuxOnline network, used my access to exploit server vulnerabilities, and got fired. I then started working on Althea, a persistent-state 94-players module for Neverwinter Nights, and that was one of the most thrilling game development experience I ever had. I worked with many talented people, and a passionate community of both modders and players. I got re-hired on JoL, misused my accesses again, and was re-fired. Which marked the end of my quite unpleasant teenage days. Paradoxically, my parents always thought I was a very calm adolescent, that caused no problem. Well, I’m sure I’ve annoyed much more people that way than by simply drinking/partying/missing school/insulting my parents. Not proud of it.

After leaving Swisscom, since being jobless wasn’t really an option financially, I joined a small pharmaceutical-related software development company, called PharmaSoft. I discovered C# there, and wrote modular upgrades to an old VB6 application. It way my first real job as a programmer, and I enjoyed it.