Timeless tech

“Origin stories” are a cliché in tech: kids writing game cheats or copying code from magazines. But they’re not just nostalgia; ideally, that curiosity continues.

My own path started with Flash, Frontpage, and Dreamweaver, trying to build a better Turkish guitar tab site. At thirteen, I made a WordPress blog and launched a few phpBB forums. At 15, I was translating subtitles in the ed2k community. At 17, I tried building a fingerboarding forum into a business.

Most of the tools I learned are now obsolete. But the curiosity and hands-on exploration stuck. In this period, I also dove into Linux: starting with Pardus 1, then Ubuntu CDs in the mail, and eventually Slackware and Arch. Exposing me to shell scripting, and vim. I never worked as a sysadmin or an SRE, but that comfort with systems shaped my career.

By chance, I had stumbled upon some timeless technologies. That helped, more than I could’ve planned. Only in hindsight is this obvious.

So now I wonder: what’s the equivalent of learning-Linux-at-15, but in the “age of AI”?

  1. Initially drawn to Pardus by motivations I later recognized and questioned, which recent trends in tech sovereignty are unfortunately reminiscent of. ↩