2017-05-28
How i started with Perl programming language
Back then, in 1998, when i got a dial-up internet connection for my IBM computer for the first time, i found "redseven". It was a online community from TV station ProSieben in Germany. They had chatrooms, guestbooks, forums and boards. At that time, i already started to build my own website with HTML and Javascript, just by try and error, without any programming skills. But i was quite limited with it.
And this is where at some point Daniel Rüd introduced me to the Perl Programming Language. I have met him in the chat and we became good friends since then. If i had any friends, most of them were older than me, because i was different, and they didn't understand why. Back then, i was at school, and he was working as an IT person at a large bank.
This was before 2001, when the dot-com bubble was still not at its peak. Sadly, i came too late for the whole thing and i never got a piece of the cake. But then again, i was really young. And internet access via telephone modem was slow and expensive. Eventually, Daniel Rüd made me a FTP account for his web server, so i could upload my first Perl projects and try them out over the internet. He was really nice and helped me with everything. This is how i got my feet wet, and since then, i never stopped writing code in Perl, even when he moved on to the PHP programming language for his projects.
And at some point, i ran my own server and started to code my own online community. Since then, most of my projects are based on Perl. I developed and tried a lot of different things on the web. For example, in 2003, i built an online vocabulary learning system, and ran it till 2009. I took the first two letters of "easy learning" and called it "eale". But i never got something that made me rich financially. I just learned a lot and got a sense of achievement, because i had many thousands of people using my services regularly.
I even told him about the crushes i had on girls at school, and was never that easy on him, but he kept listening to me. Now he has his own family and is working as IT person for a weather forecast service. Thank you to Daniel Rüd, for being friends with me for so long.