I think my relationship with computers started when I was five years old.
I was born in 1998, so when I turned five, someone gave me an old PC.
And yes, it had Windows Me.
Apparently, Windows Me has a reputation for being one of the worst versions of Windows ever made.
But five-year-old me didn't know that.
To me, that computer was incredible.
I still remember the screensavers, the weird themes, and especially those ridiculous animated mouse cursors. I had some dinosaur ones that I absolutely loved.
That computer was probably already a dinosaur itself by then, so I guess the cursors were appropriate.
And that's basically where everything started.
Step one: touch absolutely everything
I had no idea what I was doing.
Naturally, that didn't stop me from doing anything.
I wanted to click everything, change every setting, open every menu and figure out what happened when I touched something I probably shouldn't.
And that curiosity wasn't limited to software.
I also liked taking things apart.
Sometimes I could put them back together.
Sometimes I could put them back together and they would even still work.
Those were two very different achievements.
For some reason, I also had a weird fascination with computer fans.
Why?
I genuinely have no idea.
I just thought they were incredibly cool.
Fans, heatsinks, wires, PCBs... I loved looking inside computers even when I had absolutely no clue what any of those things actually did.
Eventually, after enough years of messing with computers, I became that person.
You know the one.
The computer nerd everyone asks:
"Hey, do you know how to do this?"
"My computer is doing something weird."
"Can you install this?"
"Why is the printer not working?"
And, of course, the timeless classic:
"You're good with computers, right?"
Which can mean anything from resetting a password to repairing something you've never seen in your entire life.
Then I discovered Habbo
When I was around eleven, I became really interested in online games.
And eventually I found Habbo Hotel.
I still remember Habbo very fondly.
For a shy kid who had trouble talking to people in real life, it became a completely different world.
I made friends there. Real friends.
People I could talk to for hours despite barely being able to start a conversation with someone standing in front of me.
But Habbo also introduced me to something that would end up changing my life in a completely different way:
fan sites.
Habbo had this huge community of people creating websites around the game.
They published news, rumors, trading guides, tutorials, events and all kinds of community content.
Some even had their own online radio stations, with DJs playing music, hosting contests and talking to people from the community.
And I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
These weren't gigantic companies.
They were just people on the internet...
making websites.
And suddenly I desperately wanted to know how they did it.
I wanted to build my own internet
My ambitions were completely reasonable.
I wanted to make my own Habbo Hotel.
Obviously.
I had absolutely no knowledge, no experience and no idea how any of it worked.
So naturally, I started with Notepad and a tutorial called something along the lines of:
"How to make your first website."
I wrote some HTML.
Probably some very questionable HTML.
Actually, no.
It was definitely terrible.
But then I opened the file in a browser...
And there it was.
My website.
Something I had written was being displayed by the browser.
Today that sounds like the most basic thing imaginable.
Back then?
It felt like magic.
I had never been so proud of anything.
So, obviously, I immediately wanted to show it to one of my best friends from Habbo.
I sent her the URL:
She couldn't see it.
For some mysterious reason.
I was devastated.
And that was probably my first accidental lesson in networking.
Eventually I figured out that localhost was, in fact, local.
Very useful information.
Breaking things became a learning strategy
From there, I started learning a little about servers.
Then databases.
Then Linux.
And that's where things really started getting interesting.
I loved downloading projects from the internet.
WordPress was one of them, along with random CMSs, scripts and other PHP projects that were surprisingly easy to install.
But installing them wasn't the part that interested me the most.
I wanted to understand how they worked.
So I developed a learning method that, in retrospect, explains a lot about the way I still learn technology today.
I would do something on the website.
Then I would go into the source code and try to find the piece responsible for what had just happened.
Change some text on the page.
Where is that text stored?
Submit a form.
Where does the data go?
Log into an account.
How does the website know who I am?
Click a button.
What file handles that?
Change something in the code.
Did I break it?
Yes?
Great.
Why?
And somewhere in that process, without really realizing it...
I learned PHP.
Nobody sat down and taught me PHP.
I didn't take a course.
I didn't follow some carefully designed learning path.
I just kept reading code.
Eventually, I started understanding what I was reading.
Variables made sense.
Conditions made sense.
Functions made sense.
Databases made sense.
One piece connected to another and suddenly the mysterious websites I had been using weren't mysterious anymore.
They were systems.
And systems could be understood.
I loved that.
And somehow, PHP stuck
After all these years, PHP is still my favorite programming language.
There are newer languages.
There are cooler languages.
There are languages that developers on the internet will enthusiastically explain are objectively superior to PHP whether you asked them or not.
And yet...
I always come back to PHP.
Part of it is practical.
PHP is incredibly versatile, the ecosystem is massive, and today I do a lot of my development work with Laravel, which is a framework I genuinely enjoy working with.
But part of it is also emotional.
PHP was the first programming language that really clicked in my head.
It's the language that transformed websites from something magical that happened inside a browser into something I could actually understand and create myself.
So yeah.
I'm biased.
And I'm perfectly fine with that.
The curiosity never really went away
The funny thing is that the way I learn hasn't changed that much.
Today, the things I play with are a little more complicated.
Instead of downloading random PHP scripts and trying to understand them, I might be working with APIs, authentication systems, Linux servers, containers, virtualization, networks, databases, cybersecurity, backups or some unnecessarily complicated infrastructure that I absolutely could have made simpler.
But the process is still basically:
"What does this do?"
"What happens if I change this?"
"Why did that break?"
"Can I build my own version?"
And occasionally:
"Oh no."
Technology changes ridiculously fast, and I'll admit that some of the newer stuff scares me a little.
There are approximately seventeen new JavaScript frameworks created every time I go to sleep.
AI is changing how we write software.
Infrastructure keeps becoming more abstract.
And every few months someone announces that the technology I've been using for years is apparently dead.
Maybe I'm just getting old.
At the ancient age of 28.
Please respect your elders.
Computers still humble me
And despite everything I've learned, computers have a wonderful way of reminding you that you are never actually done learning.
I can work with Linux servers, networks, virtualization, APIs and software architecture...
...and then Git will casually hit me with:
fatal: destination path '.' already exists and is not an empty directory.
Because I tried to clone a repository into a folder that already had files in it.
And for a moment, I'm five years old again.
Staring at the computer.
Touching things.
Wondering why it doesn't work.
Honestly, I hope that part never changes.
Because looking back, I don't think what got me into web development was PHP, HTML, Habbo or even that old Windows Me computer.
It was curiosity.
That feeling of seeing something work and immediately wanting to know:
"How did they do that?"
And then eventually:
"Can I do it too?"
That question took me from a terrible HTML page running on localhost to building software, managing servers and creating projects like Zibuu.
So I guess I owe quite a lot to that horrible little Windows Me dinosaur.
And its dinosaur cursors.
Especially the dinosaur cursors.
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