I am originaly from Ukraine. Moved to USA in 2018 year. Sorry for poor English... It is what it is ;-)
I started to use computer in about 1989 year. It was Sinclar ZX-Spectrum, which father bought me (thank you, dad). My life changed significantly from that time. There was a lot of games and even that old computer showed what it can win. To chees, pool or races. But I did want to win as well. And occasionally found a magazine with "How to win a game" page. There was described something like "In this game there is back counter of lives. It starts from 3 and when it is 0, you are loser. But we can remove substractor and you will have 3 lives always". It was a miracle :-). I found what usual games where we can see first-second-third level only really have 20 levels and some Congratulations with video effects at the end. I am not sure if here in the world really a lot of people who can win these games without cheat codes. I tried a lot and was far away from end. Well, so I started to "fix" games to be able win. It was a hobby, just for me and friends. But later I found a
company what did sell games (they had biggest collection) and asked, maybe they have some job for me. And yes, they had a lot. I "fixed" disk with 8-10 games for 2 dollars... :-) But I need only 10-15 minutes for one game. So I made good money for that time. There were not just "cracker's" tasks. This company made own version of ZX-Spectrum, named Pelikan-512. It had huge memory (128kb was standard, but this one had 512Kb). They also integrated HDD, Real time clock, Light pen, Mouse and made researches for integration this computer into car. I made a lot of things: games were translated to Russian, music was added, music-demos were created. I found just one link about me though
https://www.zxaaa.net/view_demo.php?id=8715 :-) Really I was shy about cracking games and never used real name, so maybe they are exist somewhere.
But time is going forward and in some time ZX-Spectrum was obsolete. And IBM-compatible were not so powerfull but expensive. So, I sold ZX-Spectrum and bought IBM-386 SX-25 (we bought together with classmate really). With B/W monitor and withouth HDD. It was 1993-1994 year. And that comp was really poor. So I sold everything and was free...
I even found a wife... :-)
But in 1996 there was second attempt and we bought Pentium-166 MMX with Windows 95. There was even CD-Rom, but brother exchanged it to modem. I was angry... :-)
In 1999 my university time was near end end was necessary to make a diploma. I made application on
O'Basic 97. Then one more, for a
job agency. And then I cannot stop anymore... :-) But unfortunately I moved to program management and testing in about 2003-2004 year. And "lost wave" as programmer. But we have got a
daughter.
Okay, but it was too boring and I decided to return back to programming. I have finished professional programming "VC++ and MFC" course in 2005 year. I wanted C#, but it was so new and there were absent teachers. So I studied it myself in parallel. And found it very friendly and powerful. It was about 2005-2006 year, I did feel how strong am I ;-) but I did not have any portfolio. Then I made several projects (
Eterio message board,
Eterio CMS,
Eterio shop,
online music catalogue) and started to work part-time as freelancer. And then in 2007 year I found job in TOM company what produces industrial weighing machines. And I cannot stop from that time... :-)
Used technologies for whole time: Basic + assembler on ZX-Spectrum (25 years ago). O'Basic 97, VC++, MFC, .Net 1.1-.Net 4.7, .Net Core, Java for automated testing + Eclipse IDE, Windows Forms, Source Safe, SVN, C#, ASP.NET, MS SQL, T-SQL, Stored procedures, DevExpress (I really hate it!), JavaScript, jQuery, Entity Framework, LINQ. Media-converters used in several applications (FFMpeg, Azure Media Services), MS Azure. I like to use JavaScript components, like NotifyJS or jQuery-UI.
Except computers and programming I like listen to music, photography, operate a drone
https://youtu.be/m6XCmAYe2GU, ride a car, bycicle, scooter, hiking.