Growing up into the Tech world

Since I was a child, I've always been in touch with technology and probably had my first experience with a computer when I was about 8 years old.

Growing up with a computer and enough free time to spend on it after school sure gave me a lot of experience in the world wide web. Most of my interest went into PC gaming and video recording stuff. So I spent most of my time playing video games, watching Youtube and trying to figure out how to do some of the cool stuff I always saw on the web.

As curious as I am, I learned how to record my screen and edit the videos to post them on Youtube. First went into recording general PC tutorials, for example, on how to record CDs and DVDs to play on other platforms, such as an unlocked PS2 at the time. I also created a blog where I posted links to programs to be downloaded and my tutorials were also published there. The blog was called MoskaDowns. It did give me a lot of knowledge on Photoshop and HTML as I would search for how to do anything on Youtube.

After publishing some video tutorials I went into recording gameplays and after about 40 videos I got to the great mark of 400 subscribers. A lot at the time but as I grew, I felt embarrassed about my old videos and decided to delete every single one of them (one of my biggest regrets). The Youtube career never really took off but for sure was one of my greatest hobbies and I'll probably get back into it someday.

At that time I also loved to watch WWE (Rey Mysterio FTW) and I watched the shows on a website that had it streamed and also had an online radio. Of course, I couldn't just watch the show as everybody else, I needed to be involved. So after contacting the owner of the website, I got to be the online DJ of that website radio from time to time. That also was a great experience as people in the stream chat asked for songs and commented on the playlist I chose at the time.

The gaming YouTuber phase was awesome and I even got to create a Minecraft server from scratch with my friends with the intention of hosting it for my subscribers and my friends to play in. It was a great time as I had some of my first experiences with code and development. Setting up the game server and its plugins took me some time but I was learning a lot on the way. For the server I also did my first website, using only HTML and CSS (and iframes to create the layout) at that time. The server did pretty well, I published some videos to my channel with hopes to get some of my subscribers into it and it worked. I remember there were about 15 daily players in it. I loved watching them enjoy a creation that my friends and I had spent so much time making. As a kid, I didn't have much money to invest into the server hosting so I needed to have enough paying VIPs on the server to cover the costs but it never got more than 1 or 2 paying players. So unfortunately after about 3 months of the server running, I had to turn it off. That time must have been in the 2010s. As time went on I lost the server files but for sure would love to revive that Minecraft map and see it again.

As you can see, my childhood was heavily based on the online and virtual worlds. So when I finished High School, going to Computer Science in College was pretty much written in the stars. I remember being in doubt about choosing Psychology or Physical Education as well but the most logical choice was the one that I took, Computer Science-related course.

After joining PUCRS, the biggest private university in the south of Brazil, in 2016, I entered the world of web development in my first internship and kept on learning in school and in the jobs I had. Kept growing as a developer and kept going for different roles and technologies at a range of companies that seemed like the right fit for me. Ended up choosing to focus on the front-end part of the development as it was always the most satisfying work for me.

All the online experiences I had in my childhood sure seemed like nothing useful but today I know that all those different fun times I was having as a kid were, in fact, little by little, giving me a bit of the knowledge I use today on my day to day work life.

Of course, there are not only positive points to a kid having a lot of online time but I hope this article can serve as a good example for you to know how some kid that is always playing video games or watching videos on the internet sometimes may be, unknowingly gathering a bunch of useful information that later in life can facilitate the work that will be done by him or her.