This is the first post of a series that will tell a story of my evolution as a programmer through all the side projects I’ve made since I started coding when I was 13, 20 years ago, in Basic.

The second post of the series is here.

I spent hours trying to find code, binaries, or screenshots of the older ones but they were lost maybe once when I cleaned my email or on those old desktops PCs which died without backups. Hopefully, I’ll transmit my passion and images through my words. Even when I am not a native English speaker.

My first side project was a desktop assistant. I named it WinQSpeaker because it was a Windows App, which let you quickly perform common and repetitive tasks, and it could talk! Or at least, speak a few words 🤣

I was in 10th grade when I asked my father if he could buy me a programming book. I saw one in the library called “Building Solutions with Visual Basic .Net”. At that time, I was learning Visual Basic 6.0 at school. That was the first time I coded something bigger than a Hello World or 2 + 2.

The teacher did not teach us what is Object Oriented Programming, neither the book. But I learnt about variables, functions and methods, and because of that it is why my code usually was everything in one file, a unique class for the whole project.

At vacations, I managed to read the entire book without coding anything and I was really anxious to program everything but I didn’t have a Windows Computer nor Internet.

Then, my dad with hard work was able to bough me a computer, an AMD Athlon, but he could not afford a Visual Studio .Net License. I was talking to my teacher about that and he told me “take this, it is not Visual Studio .Net, but it is the standard version of Visual Studio 6.0. You can use the license; it is legal for teaching purpose”

With my new computer, basic knowledge of Visual Basic, and the dial up internet account of my neighbor, I read and try so many tutorials and one day I discovered the Microsoft Text To Speech API which was used by MS Agent API. Do you remember Clippo and Merlin?

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