HPR4459: How I got into tech

Hacker Public Radio

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

Hello, I'm Wojciech (pronounciation available at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wojciech ), I'm a nerd from Poland, I work as a software engineer.

I've found HPR about a year ago and wanted to record a show since. But life is busy. I'm trying it out, in a supermarket parking lot in my car. This is my second attempt, so we'll see how it works.

How I got into tech? In a way I've kind of always been there. At least since I was a child. The story that I like to tell is when I was about 4 years old my cousing launched me Mortal Kombat on his Amiga computer and I got interested. That's my oldest tech related memory. As a kid I've mostly played video games. Mostly on clones of old 8-bit consoles like Atari 2600 or NES, later some unspecified models of Commodore and Schneider computers. I don't even remember what exact models they were. Got my first PC at about 10 years old, it was an Intel 486SX, 12 MB RAM, 850 MB HDD, running Windows 95. Still mostly playing games on the computer but, as it was running Windows, as you maybe know, with Windows come problems. Sometimes user-induced, but not always. Spoiler, it's been over 25 years and this trend continues.

Around the same time my sister went to high school and got a Turbo Pascal textbook. This is what really got me interested in programming and that's when my interests and career in software development begun. Since that time I had a very good idea what I want to do in life. I just knew I wanted to work with computers, primarily doing software engineering. I went to a technical university, Wrocław University of Science and Technology. And there I got interested in other computer related things like networking and I also got into digital and analog electronics. Just because I really wanted to go that one level deeper, to learn about how computers work, and electronics in general.

I also have other interests, but tech and non-tech related, like for example science fiction literature and I would like to record some shows about those in the future. We shall see.

There is one specific story I want to tell, but I think I will save it for October. Why October? Because it is a workplace horror story about... Windows. Well, not really a horror story story, but it was really bizarre and can be described as such. In the meantime I don't want to promise anything. But maybe I will record a show about what I am currently doing at work, which is the topic of audit trail in software applications. But I am chaotic and may do something entirely different. We shall see.

I think that's all I want to say today. I would really appreciate if you left some feedback. Was the audio OK, is my English enough, did I speak too fast? English is not my first language and I've noticed over the years that I really tend to speak too fast when using English. And that's it, thank you for listening. Hopefully we'll hear in the future from me.

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