Syntactic Sugar v3.2

About 16 years ago, I got my first computer which was a Tandon running Windows 3.1. My dad, who used to use it for work had brought back home a Digital station and had no use for the old machine anymore. Anyway, that's how I discovered the joy of MS-DOS when I was not even 7 years old. Actually, I was not that geek, my main activity on the computer were two games: Sim City and Populous¹.

A year later, in 1993, my mum brought back a Compaq running Windows 3.11 with a CD-ROM drive. I never used that machine, because at that time I spent my time on a little game on my dad's computer². That same year, my dad came back from the US with a brand new game: Doom. The day I tried it, I had a revelation: I could not stand FPS³.

In 1996, my parents bought a new computer, a Pentium Pro 200 Gateway⁴, with a 17" monitor and Windows 95. Six months later we had an Internet access. I remember that the first thing I searched using AltaVista was Lego, followed by Star Wars… Some of my parent's friends told us about a software called ICQ, and that was the beginning of a long story. When I was not chatting, I used to play to Civilization II, Myst and Warcraft.

In 1997, I remember playing a demo of a gore game which I fell in love with: GTA. I acquired the game and spent long hours tweaking it, which was real fun. I also spent numerous hours on Age of Empires, but I was too lazy to not use cheat codes. This was my last RTS experience.

A few years later, around 1999, we got a cable connection. Internet became something different: this permanent extension of existence. Terrifying. In April I downloaded my first mp3 from a chinese web page hosted on Geocities and discovered Napster a few months later. Google arrived in my life and I never used another search engine since. In the mean time, I started having some fun with ASP and VBScript, and this was my first programming experience⁵.

By the end of 2000, I spent my time playing GTA II. I got a free domain name on NameZero and created Copkilla.net and hosted something which was meant to be a fansite. And I was still using the Gateway…

The next year, I bought my very own computer and I discovered T4C⁶, my first MMORPG experience, and became an addict. I spent my life online: when I was not playing, I was on some T4C forum. I spent almost 4 years on that game, and in 2003 became Game Master and eventually Admin of a french official server. No need to say that my whole life turned around that game.

In 2003, a friend sold me a motherboard with a PIV and a GeForce V for ~20€, which was a really cheap upgrade. I got my baccalauréat and went to classe préparatoire and I had to choose between computer sciences and engineering as an option. I obviously took computer science, and this is how I met Caml and functional programming.

During the summer of 2004 and 2005 I worked at MonsieurPrix.com/Kelkoo.com. The first time I wrote a robot to scrape Amazon's catalog and insert it in the products database, the second time a robot to submit loads of keywords into Google Adwords, both projects were written using ASP.

By the end of 2005 I launched my personal blog, which was a mere conglomerate of thoughts, poems and such. I started tweaking my WordPress install and got familiar with xhtml and CSS.

In 2006, I entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and discovered a whole new world: Linux. In september I bought the HP laptop I am currently using and installed an Ubuntu on it. I then learned a few new languages: OCaml, C, C++, a little bit of Python, PHP. I started using vim as my text editor, ion3 as my window manager and became a CLI fanatic. I got contaminated by the dual screen sickness⁷.

In June 2007 I abandoned my personal blog and decided to have a more technical one, this was the birth of Syntactic Sugar⁸. I discovered Duels and launched what would be its unique fansite for 6 months. In October I finally switched to Debian and installed a server in my studio, in order to have all my web development, a few screens, etc. permanently available. In December I fell in love with JavaScript and prototype based programming. More recently, I translated this whole blog in English, and here we are.

That's all for now. I can't really guarantee that the timeline is exact, but it seems that the dates are correct⁹. I'll try to post a follow up in 10 years

1. which is the best solo game I ever played [↩]
2. I don't remember the name, it featured a blue wizard and some kind of light beams… [↩]
3. this is still true [↩]
4. G6-200 [↩]
5. shame on me… [↩]
6. The Fourth Coming [↩]
7. I haven't recovered yet [↩]
8. I should write about this name, someday [↩]
9. as far as I can trust my own memory [↩]