I am 49 years old, and I work as a developer primarily focused on creating and maintaining management and data entry applications (XML, SGML, and all that…).

I started in computing on a TI99/4A at the age of 13. With very few games available on that machine, I quickly turned to programming in order to play. One of my earliest memories is the shock I experienced during the annual town fair when I discovered Street Fighter 2. I absolutely wanted the game. I grabbed my manuals and created a mini fighting game on my TI-99/4A. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but my imagination made up for it. Another major thrill at the time was the arcade game Afterburner… I believe that game sparked my lifelong love affair with flight simulators. At 13, I even tried to code a version on my TI-99/4A, but I quickly gave up. I managed a routine that zoomed in on a house, but nothing more. It was too challenging for me at the time.

I then moved on to the Amiga and let programming take a back seat since I needed it less for gaming, as the Amiga’s game library was fantastic. What a beloved machine—my Amiga will always hold a special place in my heart. My coding adventures on the Amiga were limited to displaying a sprite in assembly and writing a few programs in AMOS.

During my studies (96-97), I had the opportunity to work on some Silicon Graphics workstations, maintaining them for researchers who used them for molecular modeling. Not much computing was required from me, but whenever I had a bit of free time, I enjoyed the built-in flight simulator on those machines. I was completely amazed by their graphical capabilities: smooth 3D and a resolution of 1280x1024 that were impossible to achieve on our personal computers. I have fond memories of that simulator—it was very simple, with nothing to do but take off, fly a circuit, and land. Had there been more enthusiasts, we could have had some network “dogfights”, but they were not exactly common in a chemistry lab.

Finally, with the advent of the PC, I entered the professional world. For over 20 years now, I have worked with VBA, PHP, JAVA, C++, GO, PYTHON, XSLT, SQL, and JAVASCRIPT. It’s amazing what one can do, even if it mainly involves generating documents.

I never abandoned programming as a hobby. On that side, I greatly appreciated the straightforward approach of BlitzBasic, explored and used the SDL library, and also played with OpenGL (in its legacy version). More recently, I’ve dabbled a bit with PyGames.

All these experiences have given me a certain adaptability; without being a specialist, you could say I manage quite well.

Stay tuned for a new page where I will share more of my adventures.