Developer Diary #1 (Beginner)

Since I was a child, I was very intrigued be computers and technology. My dad had a PC since before the day I was born, so I don't think there has been a day, when I didn't have access to a computer or the Internet. I know it's a bit weird to say (or write), but I could never imagine my life without technology. As a result there came a time when I was introduces to Programming and boy was it love at first sight.
Don't misunderstand me, my father had nothing to do with me getting into programming. He has a very vague idea about what programming is all about and nothing more than that. He is more of a hardware kind of guy.

MY FIRST ROBOT

Enough about that, let's get back to our main theme, programming. I first fount out about at the age of 10. At school we had this amazing teacher, who had a Mindstorm Robot. Sadly we were never able to play with it, because it was for the older kids. Fortunately, my dad happened to stumble upon the same robot online. Thinking that with it, me and my brother would get more into computers (as though we weren't into them already), he bought it for us.

The day it arrived, I was overwhelmed by joy and surprise. Having that same robot, or at least its parts, in my hands was too damn cool. I know it sounds a bit geeky, but imagine what you would feel like, if you had your very own robot.

So we got to building. We started out to build the first and easiest form, the tank-like car. After almost two hours, or even more, me, my brother and my father got it working. We installed the program which lets you control it and we finally started playing around with it. We were shooting balls everywhere, running around with it and generally making it do all kinds of things. It was amazing. Unfortunately, my English wasn't that good back then (I was 10 years old and lived in Greece), so I couldn't utilize the Mindstorm robot to its full potential, so after a while I stopped using it.

On the bright side, this introduced me to the beautiful world of robots which is intrinsically connected to programming and the during the following years I honed my skills as an English speaker and was able to learn programming. Still, to this day I thank my father, for buying us that robot.