About me

Growing up

I grew up in Ethiopia during a communist dictatorship regime and, besides the fact that it was early days in the computing industry, I never had exposure to electronics and computers as perhaps kids in Europe or the USA.

As my mom worked at the Italian Embassy my parents managed to get hold of a gaming console. I believe it was called SABA Video Play (or Fairchild).
My favourite games were Maze, Bowling and Volkerball (it's not a spelling mistake).

As a teenager I then made friends in the diplomatic community and I had access to more modern gaming consoles. Vic 20, Commodore 64, Atari, Activision and others.

Later, my dad bought a ZX Spectrum. I still remember one game in particular that seemed amazing to me: Flight Simulator.
Using the ZX I attempted to write my first programs. Some simple things but I had no idea what I was doing. So, I started copying stuff from magazines.
On one such magazine I came across a program that really excited me and started copying it. Unfortunately, the ZX froze at one point and died. Never recovered it and that was the end of my early programming days and never managed to learn anything really.

My dad then purchased an Amiga 500. We mainly used it to play games with my brother and school friends.

During this period occasionally I would have a look in the computer lab at my school. It seemed like entering in a space age environment for me. All geeks doing who knows what. Although I was fascinated, I never really went deeper.

High school

I then moved to Kenya for the final years of high school and I convinced my parents to buy me an Amiga 2000. What a machine for the day. My friends had MS-DOS! But, once again, I was too busy chasing girls and doing other teen stuff to really get involved in computers.
Later on in life when I looked back at how much it cost, I thought my parents were nuts.

The turning point

The breakthrough came when I moved to Italy for college. I started my degree in civil engineering, following my dad's footsteps. I soon realized it wasn't for me and switched to business and economics as I was good at it in school. But this didn't excite me either.
I purchased a PC with windows 3.1 and that's when my passion for computers exploded. I got my first modem and could go on-line!! I still remember that day. Felt like I was in the famous War Games movie. I never became a hacker though!

Software

Although I became good at using computers, it was only when one day I decided to purchase a student edition of Visual Basic that my programming career and passion for software development truly came to life.
I taught myself how to program and got hooked. Passed a lot of time coding simple utilities and at some point also started learning html and created my personal site during the Netscape Navigator days.

Work

When my love for computers and programming got more serious, I passed a lot of time at my local computer shop, which also did software development, and became friends with them.
From time to time I would show them what I was working on and this got their attention. Shortly after they gave me little projects to work on. Months later I quit college and asked them for a job. They hired me!

I started working on various products and, from a self-taught developer, I became their lead developer in a few years. I worked there for close to 10 years until I felt the need to start my own company. I missed Africa and my family as well, so I moved back to Ethiopia to do that.

In 2005 I founded Abakon Systems (Abakon being the greek origin of the latin Abacus) and that's that. Looking back, moving to Ethiopia has proved to be challenging and I also lost touch with the much larger developer community and perhaps gave up opportunities to work in a much more advanced IT industry. Internet has helped but it's been a lonely road in a sense. But, that's history and the journey continues.

Today I'm a full stack developer. My experience and skills are more aligned with desktop enterprise software and back-end development although I did and do work on web projects and recently smartphone apps and yes, I've built this site myself!

I use and I have used many programming languages and tools. Having started with Visual Basic it stuck with me for a long time and I've loved VB.Net as my main programming language but have been moving to C#.
I'm much more involved in projects in the Microsoft/.NET Framework eco system which I love (and hate sometimes) but, especially given the direction of the IT industry, I am also following other avenues.