This St. Valentine's Day show the love for your craft

St. Valentine’s Day is all about love and we celebrated it the only way we know, by showing our love for software. We asked our team to share their love story. ??

Curiosity was my spark

“I was 6 years old when my brother taught me how to read my favorite comic book online. Over the years, reading comic books just wasn’t enough. I had to understand how they were shown in that screen, that’s when I opened Google developer console for the first time. And a question popped up in my head: “How can I learn more?” and I haven’t stopped asking that same question since.”

The mechanic turned developer

"When I was a kid, no remote control car survived in my hands. I liked to disassemble the cars to see what was inside and then my dad would help me reassemble the car back together. A few years later, my uncle gave me his old computer and what did I do? Disassemble, of course! My luck was that I had a neighbor that understood electronics and helped me put the computer back together, when we turned it on, it was working! I always had an eagerness inside me to understand how electronics work and later I started searching for how virtual windows were made and how they work. It was at that moment of my life that I found out I wanted to always learn new things."

The adrenaline junkie

“The moment I realized I was in love with software was at a MicroRato contest at the University of Coimbra. My teammates had me watching while they were coding, the pressure and excitement to submit the code on a time trial exercise was when I realized I wanted that for life. It had to be me to push the button.”

The early entrepreneur

?"I always had an interest in technology. With 4 years old, I got my first computer and started learning MS-DOS to create commands to shut down the computer.. When I was 11, I was already creating .bat files to send to my friends via MSN to shut down their computer, just for fun. I started learning more about HTML, CSS and a little bit of PHP creating tumbler themes. With 14, I was doing web design freelancers and It was when I decided I wanted to make a career out of it, I always liked developing and creating new things, from front to backend."

The Robin "hacker" Hood

“I was in 8th grade and didn't have internet at home, so I used a software to crawl a website and download all the files so that I could explore it at home. One day I downloaded the school website and, out of curiosity, I started to open random files. To my surprise, one of those websites contained a list of usernames and matching passwords. Of course, the next day, I tried to log in to the website (with the director's credentials), and, again, it worked! So I did what a 15-year-old would do: left a funny message on the school's homepage in the director's name. It was fun to see everyone laughing about it and only I knew who did it. On that day I learned that I liked to play around with websites and my school's director learned that it is not a good idea to hard code user credentials in javascript.”

The eager learner

"One day, I was at home and my dad brought me a new machine, a recent 80286 PC (personal computer)! I was only familiarized with video games but soon the computer became my new best friend forever! My dad enrolled me in a programming course and I started to learn how to program in the Clipper Summer ’86 version, an old language for MS-DOS. I did some good things in that language and years later, I learned a new language, an object programming oriented language, Object Pascal. Delphi opened to me a new world for windows programming and I created my first program in Delphi: The Dots and Boxes game. Dots and Boxes was my classical game in school, for many times my friends and I were playing that game with a pencil and a blank sheet, good times!"

The ZXSpectrum cook

"I was 15 years old when I found out about Software Spectrum Maganize, it had a bunch of examples of programmes that I could run on ZX Spectrum. One day, I decided to put it in my console, and it all looked like magic! The fact that I had to write the code perfectly or I’d lose it all, made me fall in love with programming.”

The one friend that claims to never be in love, even when he does romantic things

One day when I was a kid, my dad got home with a ZX Spectrum 128K+3. I remember going to bed and finding the instructions right by my bed. I was so bored, I started to read. The last part of the manual was a bit different from the rest of it, it explained that we could write programs in Spectrum! The computer was able to understand basic dialect and execute the with the provided instructions. - Amazing!- I thought.

No one in my family was interested or impressed with my abilities. Actually, neither was I. Playing soccer was way more fun than staying hours trying to understand what characters the machine would understand.The years went by and I was in High School with an "Introduction to Information Technology'' subject. I specifically liked that subject because I didn't have to work that hard. It was easy for me to reach my goals and with that I would have more time for playing around. Curiously, my friends did not share my opinion.

In 1996, there was this band in Portugal called "Rio Grande" and in between the songs they released, there was "Postal dos Correios" sang by Rui Veloso and Tim, and he would sing:

"The boy studies in the computers

They say it is a job with an exit"

That was literally music to my ears! Today, people ask me "When did you fall in love with computers and programming?" and my answer is Never. I never loved programming. It is my job because it happened that I acquired the knowledge that it is well appreciated for people to compensate me with generosity.

However it was, apparently Rui and Tim were right. It really was a job with an exit."

A big shoutout to craftable’s team for sharing amazing stories and let’s all sing along Rio Grande: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSlMDD2ww1k ?