Way back, very very way back, when I was approximately 13 years old and we got our first computer at home.....Whoops, now I come to think about it, it is even before then when my interest in programming emerged....
My neighbour friends had a computer, more specifically, a Commodore 64. The older one of the two was the more advanced user. He had books about programming his own games, that was awesome. That is where my first interest in programming started. But.... It lasted several years untill we got our first computer. We even moved in the mean time....
Now back to the time of our first computer.... The first day there was nothing installed on it, and I even got satisfaction by booting up and pressing delete to get some color, being the BIOS. The day after a friend of my father installed windows on our computer and it was time to start exploring the new possibilities. But.... The first thing I asked him after he said he was done was: "How do I make programs?". Strange question for a 13 year old. And he replied with a: "Get a book about windows 95 first and master that first, if you do that I'll maybe explain how to make programs".
Ofcourse for me that wasn't enough and it didn't last long untill I found someone who could give me the tools. Visual Basic 5.0.... Wow... Cool... And you have to note this: Examples are the best way to learn something. No dusty theories but just plain old examples. That's how I did it. I started making cool little tools and figured out how to make them work as I wanted them to. My neighbours (new neigbours, we moved, remember) had a tool GWBasic, on which I started experimenting too (Yes, I know, that is a step back, but I was curious). Eventually I wanted to make programs and get people to buy them, or download them. And I had a name to produce them under, it was "Mastronardi Software" (Where Mastronardi is my last name and Software obviously is the thing I was producing). I needed a good medium... so... I've gotten my father to buy a CD Writer to be able to distribute the software.... But... Beïng so young I didn't really bring out much.
The Internet cought my attention too, and, after nagging my father for a long while, I was allowed to connect to the internet. It wasn't a simple connection thoug, I've gotten him to buy an ISDN modem (you know, to get full speed internet :-)). I started on the free hosting of my webprovider, but I wanted more.... I saw the cool domainname system, and I wanted that too. But as you may well remember, it was very very expensive, not only the domain name itself, but also finding hosting where you where able to connect a domain name to it. But, taking part in a project called "The warehouse" where they where looking for young talent to do stuff in multimedia, and which I felt I could be part of, I've gotten the chance to be hosted on a high bandwidth webserver, where I only had to pay for the domainname. Unfortunately their pricing was about 4200 Belgian Francs (about €104) for a single domainname. I guess you can figure out how expensive the hosting must have been for being a youngster wanting to have a website with a domainname. But I have to mention they where a Class A hosting provider, and for such good service/uptime there are good prices.
After making my website on my new website I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted to make very neat mailing scripts... And I found some CGI scripts, but I couldn't get them to work... I asked my inside technical contact what was wrong and he explained me the difference in webserver type's. The fact was that I was located on a Windows environment, and not linux (which he preferred ofcourse :-)) forcing me to get another script that worked on windows hosting. Being..... ASP.
This was superb, I was able to do all sorts of strange, but cool, things that where impossible with only html and extensive use of javascript. I made my own site, with all kinds of applications, some of them still beïng used at this time of writing (26-03-2007).
I've been working for a very long while in ASP, and after seeïng asp+ coming by (Later renamed to ASP.NET) and seeing some strange tags like <asp:Label runat="server" /> I figured I would stick to ASP for a while, because that strange new ASP thing looked very complex.
It was only untill recent (only a few years ago now) that I ran into .NET again, it was in the "Xios Hogeschool Limburg" (The school of higher education that I was attending for 2 years then) where they started working with VB.NET and where I saw that building applications wasn't much of a difference with VB, (which I also attended voluntarily the year before, just out of curiousity). As VB was cancelled and replaced by VB.NET, resistance was futile. So I figured out to work with VB.NET while still developing website's in ASP (with VB Script). If I remember correctly it was only in the third year that we had a small introduction to ASP.NET where I was trying to persist some basic values to the session instead of getting them out of the ASP.NET controls as it was intended. But what can you expect after being an ASP Guru for such a long while.
It wasn't long before I saw what an advance this was to classic ASP. It was very easy to separate code from content (being very cool for my FreeGuestbook application which I was building for a while now). An aspect of ASP.NET that I still use for the smallest piece of html/text with every site I make today.
In the last year..... oh, now I remember, it was in the second year, not the third year that they covered asp.net for the first time).
Ok, again: In the last year we had to do an Internship... And since I'd met some girls in France who invited me to visite them in holland during a festival, and I tought about studying abroad before, I figured I could try to do an internship in holland, a country that was (is) advancing very fast in the web industry. That way I could be close to friends (200 km's from home, not beïng alone abroad) and beïng in a leading country in web-development in the neighborhood. I found two company's where I could start after my first talk. I had to make a choice, and beïng a student with limited resources I chose for Tam Tam. One of the reasons was the .NET technology, where the other company developed in Php (not a bad language or anything, but it was not (yet) my expertise). The other reason (the one for which the limited resources come around the corner) was the price of a room, and the amount of expenses compensation beïng almost equal. Thus making it possible to lighten the load of the room costs. (Yes, it sounds quite stupid, but holland wasn't one of the countries where the school had an agreement with or where they've gotten a scollarship for).
After doing my internship for 3 months I was offered a job at Tam Tam. Unknowingly I was even already put in the planning of which they said in the monday morning meetings that if I descided that I wouldn't come they would have a big problem with their planning. Luckily after giving it some tought, and with my parents saying that this is a one time chance, I descided to accept the offer. Unfortunately finding a room in Holland (more especially in delft, city of the delfts blue and the Technical University) they offered me to go to a bed and breakfast hotel for a few days untill I found a room. And now, since 29th of august 2005 I've been working there. Beïng one of the technical discoverers of new techniques and architectures I now dive into the deeps of the .NET Framework and I've already fixed my little annoyances of the MCMS 2002 system. While striving for perfection I tryout all kinds of techniques and functions inside the .NET universe, I figured I could aswell share it with the rest of the world. Hence I set up this blog to do so.
Maybe some of you, who managed to read up till here, wonder about what happened to Mastronardi Software... Well, it is still alive, but only a lit more silent than before. My only last dream (besides beïng able to steer a small airplane) is to make it a real company, and make it a top 5 internet company in Belgium, just like Tam Tam is in the Netherlands. Stay close to see when it happens....