About me

Programming

I started programming with the scripting language of the windows command line called Batch. It was pretty fun for a while and taught me the basics of programming. Eventually though I started looking for a new language because I became limited with the capabilities of Batch.

Python

So after trying out a few languages that I thought where to complicated for me like C# and Java, I started learning Python. It was way more fun, and I could do basically whatever I wanted. It was also the first time I was able to develop a Graphical User Interface using Tkinter which was mind-blowing to me. I spent the following years learning as much as possible about Python and developing tons of Programs. But all that time I only ever developed Desktop Applications and didn't know that there was more to programming. Then I found out that there were more programming fields, and I became interested in a lot of them like Web Development and Machine Learning. Although I would have liked to, I would not have been able to learn all of them at the same time, so I started with Web Development.

Web Development

But as I soon found out I wasn't able to develop Web Applications with Python. In fact, it is only possible to do so using Javascript. So even though I loved Python I started getting myself familiar with HTML, CSS and Javascript. It was surprising to me that Javascript itself wasn't that different from Python, and I had already learned the basics of HTML and CSS while developing Webscrapers in Python. Soon I also learned about the difference between Front-End-Development and Back-End-Development.

Back-End Development

The courses I followed were recommending using Node.js (a Javascript runtime) for the Back-End because it was using Javascript too so I learned to use that as well. I also tried using Python web frameworks like Flask and Django, but later on I decided that using Express as a Node.js framework was simpler. To minimize costs for some of my projects I also learned about the concept of Serverless development and cloud functions. I used AWS Lambda and some other AWS products to create my APIs. In grade 12 I started learning about PHP in school.

Front-End Development

When developing my applications one problem occurred a lot: How could I reuse HTML code on multiple pages. Even though I had learned JQuery that could load in HTML dynamically it became really cluttered. That's when a friend of mine told me to use a Front-End-Framework like Angular, React or Vue. He recommended Vue, so I started learning that first. This website itself is built with Vue. But after learning about different website/webapp structures I found out that using Vue alone as a SPA framework was not good for load times and SEO. I learned about SSR and Static Site Generation. To improve the performance of my website I decided to learn Nuxt.js which is a framework to develop Vue apps that can be statically generated and rendered on the server.

C++

After changing schools between grade 10 and 11 I started getting IT classes and the first language we learned was C++. It was a lot more low level than any of the languages I had learned before but because it was a beginner course we did not learn a lot. So the first time I really started to learn more about C++ was for my "Facharbeit" (a big project in grade 12 for which German students have half a year of time). One of my friends and me developed a bartender bot which let you select cocktails on a touch display which the machine would then prepare. It used an Arduino micro-controller which ran a subset of C++ and forced me to learn a lot more about object oriented C++.