I dreamt with Steem 8 years ago

This is my #introduceyourself, in chapters.
I bet you'll like it.

Some profiling

I'm Fernando, widely known in the Interwebz as cypher, my 16 years old nickname.

I have into my account 30 years
I have a son, a step daughter and a brand new ex-wife. :P
I code since I had 14 years old.
I come from a struggling working class loving family
I'm from Argentina
Some people think I'm a failure others think I'm a genius.
They are all wrong.
I'm in Wikipedia! :F

First years

My first "success" story was at elementary school, back in those days, there was a boom of pirated CD copies in my country, at that time I had my first computer for about a year, and every software I had was from a pirated CD copy as in Argentina there werent pretty much of original copies (which I couldnt buy anyway). In stores (yes there were stores for pirated CDs, a lot of them) the price for almost any copy was arround $5 ARS, (ARS were tied up to USD) but one day, hanging with a friend playing some newly bought games (with saved money from our school meals budget) we found in a newspaper an ad from some guy that was selling copies for $0.50, there was a phone number. We called right away and we found that he delivered them for free with a catalog. A few moments later he was ringing at our door with our copies of a couple games we couldnt fine elsewhere.

We said each other "wow this is so cheap, instead of 1 game for saving a meal, we can get 10, and eat more hahah", then my friend said, "what if we sell this copies in school for $5, then we would get 9 games for every copy we sell". We went running to the library and ordered a few copies of the catalog with our last pennies. For the first time we were anxious about going to school. The next day, after removing the XXX items from the catalog, we got a few CDs ordered. The next, a few more. By the end of the week we were (from our point of view) rich. Games were never that fun anymore, we had a business.

A few days later, our cartel were discovered, we were reprimendended but school authorities were always benevolent with me so the main problem were that we couldnt sell anymore. But there were a few schools in the neighborhood so we rushed to those when we got out from ours, giving catalogs away with an email for orders. It worked for a few days, but our provider went missing. It all endend, we felt sad but we had good money and not much to buy.

Early highschool years

Time passed and I found myself in first year of hishschool, nobody knew each other. That year I had my first internet connection (Dial-up) as my parents thought that there was my future. Right the I started my first website with.. cof cof.. frontpage (ugh, sorry for the flashback).

I somehow found info about publishing that page, wich consisted in a recopilation of jokes found on the web, in times of altavista, AOL, geocities. It was a boring web. Somewhere I read that I needed a hosting and FTP client to "upload" my html. Then I remembered some criptic thing I read in the ISP flyer ("Hosting and FTP for free") so I called them and asked how to activate that or use it. They were shocked as I were the first to ask for it as well by the fact that I was 13 years old, so they kindly helped me step by step with little hassle. I was trhilled.

That year and the next, the internet sphere boosted significantly (remember the bubble?), I switched frontpage for notepad++, then dreamweaver, by 2001 I had my own FTP server in my house, lurked a few boards (vBulletings evrywhere!).

That year there was a site like ebay here, called MercadoLibre, they paid $5 for every referred sign up, so I was back making "easy" money (I dont think that even exists), I bought my first CD burner and that year I had incomes from that affiliate program (pretty much) and from buring music CDs on demand for my school friends and soon for the entire school, that wasnt a lot of money but it gave me some kind of reputation in the entire school, and if you were a girl or a good friend of mine you were in priority list and I had a list of content already sold so I gave them for free to them if they would bring me a blank disc. Eventually I started selling only a compilation of vids, music, images curated by me that I called "Taringa". They all loved it and it was an easy job for me and I really liked that editorial task.

Coding newbie, highschool dropout

By 2013 I was trhilled to start a "dynamic" web site, so I deployed a PHPNuke (Wow I almost forgot its name) in my own computer and called this site Taringa. My computer blew up with my few of my friends accesing and some people from the boards I posted. So I searched for an alternative, a simple CMS called CuteNews that had a plugin for users to load content. Its database were a plain text file :P. Eventually it was bloated and found out that I had to use a good database but couldnt go back to PHPNuke, so I started coding my own site. An hispanic "clone" of one I loved to access called Teoti.com.

It worked good and had me so entertained mantaining and improving it. I liked the experience a lot and I felt great, being a teen, thats not so common so I seem to had skipped the dark side of teenage years.

A couple years later, arround 2005 I dropped school as I was working a underpaid freelance coder and making good money to help in the house. My notes were good but no homework done.

All photos on this posts are mine

First real world job

Asked for a full time job in a tech board and a guy that loved Taringa (which at that time it was on an external hosting that hosted the site for free in exchange for an ad placement and had quite some users) told me that in his job they were looking for a coder. So I jumped in, with my new boss making me promise to finish highschool (which I never did).

My first office job

I was earning more money than my hard-working dad and mom. At the end of that year my salary was upgraded two times and my friends were finishing school. In the summer, we paid our first vacation trip ourselves.

My friends on those vacations.

Great things happened, I had a couple t-shirts from my website looking to promote it somehow, it had arround 10000 hits a day but it seemed to me not much. A night on that trip we went to a pub and went to the bar asking for a couple beers, then the barman said "Hey were did you get that t-shirt?!", I couldnt believe it, nor my friends. I told the guy that I made them as I its my website; We drank for free that night. It was my first "income" from the site.

Note: By that time, Taringa was full of content, links, gifs, images, NSFW images, and "warez" links.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030501000000*/http://www.taringa.com.ar/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taringa!
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taringa!

Introducing myself, or: How I dreamt with Steem 8 years ago.