The Story: The first adventure
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
Well, I must say that every new beginning is hard, not impossible, as we diverge from the routine and face the challenges we evolve and that’s what made us what we are now.
C# wasn’t just a programming language for me, it was the portal and the binding relic to the computer science and software engineering world. Back on 20 August 2010, i interacted for the first time with the open-source community. I asked myself, why to try to change the author’s information of Mozilla Firefox, while I can actually write one myself. The answer was codeproject.com. I found an open-source browser, written in C# that uses Internet Explorer engine (Trident). I downloaded and opened the project, started like the usual, changing properties, colors, removing and adding components. Gradually, I found myself capable of displaying messages on click (the first event-driven code). A completely different browser is live in 10 days. With a new challenge in hand, which is how to deliver this product to the world.
The website was the first medium, unfortunately, no one knew what I was doing and what’s “Fireweb Navigator”. So, I had to make an installer, use my PKI knowledge to sign the executable, upload the NSIS installation to the website and see the results.
Back then I wanted to learn more about C#, so I used Fireweb to do that, I started adding features like turning the bar green when an EV SSL is used to secure the connection, adding history tracking and settings form. Step by step, I started to learn about object-oriented, methods, events, variables and more… It was surely different than PHP and HTML but I was really excited to learn more. As my passion and the reward pathways drove me, I used the best way to learn in me, which is by doing things. At that moment I realize, a web browser isn’t enough and the decision to expand came in by the mid-September 2010, the moment I joined high school (my first year).
I decided to change the business name to “Arsslensoft”, oh yeah it looks like Microsoft, create a new logo and create virtual divisions:
- Arsslensoft Game Studio
- Arsslensoft Development Studio
- Arsslensoft Pictures
- Arsslensoft Research
From September till November, I’ve explored cryptography (Crypto Manager), gaming using XNA framework (Racing Evolution Game), code interpretation from basic to javascript (ASPL), markup languages (ASML, ASMF), simple code editors (Arsslensoft Studio 2011), Linux distribution generation using SuseStudio (Flydows XT)…Basically, it was a cloning fever.
With so many tools in hand, so many concepts, poor English, slow computer, doing video editing, writing code, publishing, targetting various domains… I was calling out the world, hey guys, I’m here you can see that I want to join you. Then the presentation video came to life, on November 2nd, 2010.
The second version of Fireweb Navigator released on 23rd November 2010 with a video coming out on the Facebook page.
Being inspired by tech giants made me explore every step of the software construction from design, implementation to delivery and support without knowing the methodologies we know nowadays (Agile, Waterfall…).
The fever started to fade away, giving birth to a new challenger.
With a new badge that looked like this:
To be continued…
