Fun, I guess. 😊 Just ran into my old projects, and of course I took the chance to clean the dust off my old work. I was shocked how many kinds of things I've been working on during the past 16+ years. Thought it would worth celebrating today, and have a look at where I started and where I arrived.

Back in 2003, when I started high-school, it was quite common that you learned Pascal programming language if you joined computer sciences field of study. I was really against it since C++ seemed much cooler. I was so silly. Pascal and Object Pascal was fun. The tools provided with them were so retro but feature rich. My first game was a Football Manager game, with graphical interface rendered with Pascal's graphics library on a canvas. No aids or whatsoever. Every change on the screen had to be programmed. I loved it. Then I tried out Delphi's Object Pascal and Windows targeted development kit, and created a Mosquito Killer game. It was easier and more intuitive. Finally that game was a graduation project from the school. I even wrote a DOS Pong game for one of my colleagues.
Of course besides these there was my huge love at first sight when I found out of the existence of C# and .NET. It was way cooler than Delphi. I could create any kinds of UI's and even simple games with GDI.
Despite having the game developer blood in my veins I earned my first money in the high-school by creating a webshop website from scratch, which I wrote in PHP. Since then I created many websites, web applications, some with PHP, others with Flash, and a bunch with JavaScript.

Creating websites as a freelancer, was an acceptable source of cash, back in 2007. So I kept doing it, while I was accepting design work too, by creating logos and website designs.
In 2008 started a fulltime job as Adobe Flex developer. I already worked with Flash by then. It was so nice to have an enterprise level framework that was capable to do almost everything. So I used it for literally everything. Besides my daily job and freelance works, I made lots of personal projects with it. One of them was an online radio that streamed music from an Adobe Media Server, had Facebook login capability, had voting feature for the next song, stored user preferences and so on. A friend of mine was coding the back-end part of it. We had a big group of students at the university who listened to our radio.

Let's fastforward in time to the point when I decided to create a game development startup at the end of year 2012. I already had a lots of websites finished. Many of them died like the dinosaurs, but some of them are still working, and couple of them are still using my design. Quite funny to see that. Before the game dev story, I was busy with a friend of mine creating those web projects, and even hosting them for our clients. Creating a hosting environment, server scripting and maintenance were our big challenges at that time. We had plans to create a social network for traveling people. Design, documentation, domain name purchase were in place already, but I felt that I need to get into game industry. So I slowly stopped doing the web thing in my freetime, and focused on learning Unity3D, CryEngine, Unreal Engine. While my friend still worked on our old projects, he joined me in the startup together with other friends.
Flex and Flash was slowly dying, at my main company we worked on web apps, on more or less interesting projects, and slowly the trance caused by the creative work on games kicked in. We didn't succeed, but we had a lots of fun projects, game ideas, game jam entries. We regret nothing! 😋 Worked on a MMO game, on an sci-fi adventure game, on a platformer. I created a turn-based pong-like strategy game, that I never released.
As Unity uses C# and is soo versatile I love working with it, I think I will never get bored of game development.

The years passed so quickly, and suddenly I saw myself very distant from working on my game projects, since my job required a lot of focus on other kinds of things. It wasn't a big issue since I learned a lots of technologies, worked on apps for Android, iOS and used even Xamarin for that. Had chance to become a leader at the company, work with cloud services, like AWS. Create apps with Flutter.
Oh yes, Flutter. That little ugly bird with the incomplete language of Dart.. It came to the rescue. I have an ongoing project that had some prototypes written in .net, in Angular, but none of them seemed performant enough. And then bird came, whistled and easily did what had to be done. 100% customizable and fast UI with tons of on-screen elements. Super cross platform. Easy to work with. So I'm here right now. Working with Flutter. I never let down C#, dotnet and Unity. I use them also.

Such nice memories. 🥲 Maybe at some point I'll create a proper portfolio out of all my fun projects, but until then I remain with my memories.