📅 Timeline
It's hard to know how far I have come, without looking back over multiple years.
1990s
One day, my Dad brought home a PC. Not knowing what it was, I put some paper cards in the floppy disk drive. The papers stayed there for a long time because no one noticed.
My parents took computer classes to learn Excel and Word. I remember playing outside the classroom where all the students were adults. They learned to type using a printed keyboard layout, starting with basic typing skills before learning mouse navigation. Excel and Word were considered the advanced courses.
A few years later, we got a modem, opening up a new world of possibilities. The world felt both bigger and smaller at the same time. I have been having the same feeling every once in a while whenever new technology emerges.
2000s
My older brother got SNES emulator with a bunch of games on our PC. Gaming and watching him play was fun, even though I barely understood what was going on since I didn't know much English, let alone Japanese.
I remember breaking my right pinkie and playing a hacked version Fire Emblem 4 with boosted stats and skills. It hurt to use keyboard shortcuts, because I didn't know how to remap the keys.
2009
I learnt to use Stata in my classes to analyze data and make graphs. It got me interested in programming, but I didn't act on it for a few years.
2012
Learnt my first programming language, Python with Learn Python the Hard Way.
MOOC were just starting to become popular, so I took a few online courses.
2013
I wanted to have a personal website. Luckily this domain was available, and I have been using it since then.
For 2 years, I got the cheapest OVH VPS in France during Black Friday for about $12/year and pushed my html files to it via scp.
With only me as visitor, the VPS had abundant resources, so over time I added more services to it. I had rclone to sync downloaded files to [Google Drive]. My college allowed unlimited Google Drive storage, so I put everything in there.
2015
I purchased a Raspberry Pi for local development machine.
After trying out multiple Linux distros (Mint, Debian, Arch...), I settled with Ubuntu as my development environment. I wanted to try Gentoo but my machine was too slow to compile everything.
2024
I bought a Beelink SER5 Mini PC, as Raspberry Pi was too expensive and no longer cost-effective. Instead of installing Ubuntu Server on it, I gave Proxmox a try. I had a VM to run Pihole and multiple Ubuntu VMs for Docker compose.
During a sales, I bought 2 more Mini PCs to create a Proxmox cluster for HA. I was looking into Docker swarm to manage the cluster of Docker daemons, but I came across k8s and k3s and decided to try them instead.