Before Christmas, I received the good news that I become a Java Champion. And then many memories came to my mind. My first computer, the ZX Spectrum that my parents bought me when I was 6, the first game I had, Desperado (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0009331) from TopoSoft. All programs that I copied from books in Basic language, all modifications I did and of course all the "pokers" that I copied from magazines to have infinite lives in games.
After that, it started the PC era, where I remember creating many "bat" files for having different memory configurations for playing games, editing saved files with Hex editors to have millions of resources and the appearance of Turbo C in my computer.
Finally, the internet era, that for me started in 1997, and my first browser which it was Netscape. What good old time, and then my first web page and JavaScript.
And this moves me towards the key point, I think it was at 1999 or 2000, I bought a magazine which it came with a CD-ROM with Java 1.2 there, I installed and I started programming in Java without IDE until today.
Probably this is the life of many of developers that were born in the 80s.
But this is only "scientific" facts, not feelings. These days I have been thinking about the feelings I had, what ruled to me all this time, and it came to my mind the opening theme of one of my favorite TV program called "This is Opera". Exactly the same words can be applied in my case for programming/computing/Java.
I cannot finish without thanking all the people who I met over the globe during conferences, starting with Dan Allen (the first one I met at a conference), all Arquillian team, Tomitribe team with David Belvins at head), Asciidoctor community, Barcelona JUG guys and a lot of people, organizers, attendees, .... every one thank you so much for being there.
Of course, all the workmates I had in University (La Salle), in Aventia, Grifols (thanks to Erytra team, I enjoyed so much during all years I was there), Everis, Scytl, CloudBees (LLAP to Jenkins) and finally Red Hat, a company that I really love and I feel like home.
Last but not least my family who has been there all the time.
Next year I will continue posting more posts, contributing more to open source projects and of course going to speak to as many events as possible.
We keep learning,
Alex.
Caminante son tus huellas el camino y nada más: caminante, no hay camino se hace el camino al andar (Caminante No Hay Camino - Joan Manuel Serrat)
Follow me at https://twitter.com/alexsotob
