From Floppy to Cloud
How I learned to code, told as a scrollable stack of artifacts: DOS, floppy disks, QBasic, the web, JavaScript, Kubernetes, Rust, and the strange new edge of AI.
Motherboard, CPU, RAM, GPU, HDD. A box of parts became a machine that could be told what to do.
Building
blocks
The first time I built a PC from parts,it was like putting together a puzzle with no picture on the box. Each component either clicked into place or didn’t fit at all. When it finally powered on, it felt like I had created something from nothing.
The machine was something I put together with my own hands.
The dark screen with a blinking cursor.
Blinking
cursor
It started with a black screen and a cursor. No instructions, no clues, just a quiet invitation to type. All what I wanted to do is to play prince of persia but first I had to learn how to talk to the machine.
The first interface was a blank slate.
thirty minutes of anticipation before the world appeared.
Prince
of Persia
A pixelated prince leapt over guards, missed ledges, and fell into spikes. It was the first time software felt less like a tool and more like a place someone had imagined into existence.
Loading became part of the myth.
Thought became instruction, and instruction became output.
Hello,
World
QBasic made the machine feel responsive in a new way. It did exactly what I told it, which also meant it exposed every assumption I forgot to write down.
Control arrived as a blue screen.
The secret door was just plain text in the browser menu.
Markup
fever
Right-click, View Source. Suddenly the surface of the web had a skeleton. A library book taught me HTML, then CSS, and the page stopped being magic without becoming less magical.
The web was readable by anyone curious enough.
Python was simple, powerful, and full of surprises.
func()
I started with Python 2 because it was the language of a popular Minecraft modding tutorial. It felt like a more polite version of JavaScript, with fewer ways to shoot myself in the foot. But as I built more, I found libraries that did way more than I expected, and the weird parts of Python became a map to new possibilities.
The language was a toolbox with some hidden compartments.
The app became infrastructure, and infrastructure became product.
Kubectl
apply
Docker made the application portable. Kubernetes made the system explicit. I stopped thinking only in functions and started thinking in rollout, recovery, traces, and blast radius.
The shape of software got bigger.
A language that refused to let me hand-wave memory.
Borrow
checked
Rust was exacting in the best way. No garbage collector, no undefined behavior, no vague ownership. Every error message was a small lesson in building with more care.
The compiler made rigor feel humane.
AI, collaboration, inference, and the old cursor blinking back.
What
comes next
Kubernetes, Rust, AI. Real-time collaboration, distributed inference, language models that write and read code. The old cursor is still here, but now it feels like a doorway.
The prompt is another beginning.