Let me introduce myself. My name is Thomas Flemming and I work as an independent freelance full stack web developer. I live in Oslo, Norway with two small kids. Twenty years ago, in 1996, I was also working as a freelance full stack web developer and I also had two small kids that now both are studying in Oslo.

Childhood

I was born in Oslo in the late sixties. My parents was only 21 when they got me. Just a year later my only sister was born. My father didn't have any formal education but my mother studied to become an art director. I remember my mother sitting in the kitchen working on catalogues with letraset, ink and lots of pens.

Hacking in the early 1980s

When I was in my early teens my father quit his job and started his first company. He started importing optical frames that he sold to opticians. My mom also quit her job to help my father out. My first paid job was to clean their office. The salary helped me buy my first computer in 1982. A Spectrum ZX 81 with a blazing fast 3.25 MH processor and 16Kb memory expansion hooked up to the TV in the living room. I didn't know what a computer program looked like, but after a year I was able to create a frogger like game at the age of 15 in basic with ascii art. Soon I replaced the SX 81 with a Commodore 64. After a year the source code for one of my programs was printed in a magazine for computer hobbyists. It was a small piece of code written in basic and 6502 assembler code to start and stop the motor on the cassette tape. If you had several games on a single cassette, the program could stop the motor when the cassette player was done fast forwarding. We also had fun creating interrupt routines in assembler that would make the screen flicker by the touch of the joystick button.

Hacking in the early 1990s

At school I didn't feel my parents expected much from me. When I was in middle school I told my father that I wanted to become some kind of engineer. He told me to get back to earth and find a more realistic goal. After being bored beyond belief in high school I spent another one and a half year being even more bored serving military service. We were looking at a radar screen for the Norwegian air force. We did see an american supersonic SR-71 spy plane and a few Russian MIG fighters on the radar screen. Rest of the time it was boring. Finally I was able to start studying computer science at the University of Oslo. It was absolutely paradise and I quickly got involved in all sorts of social activities. I did the accounting for the biggest student association and started playing tuba in a student orchestra. After a couple of years I got a part time job as a programmer for the institute of mathematics. In 1993, right before the web and GMS phones got popular, I made an app for the Mac that sort of looked like a Motorola Advisor text pager on the screen. Users would type in a pager number and some text and click the send button. I also wrote the server that had to be run on a sun unix computer with a modem connected to it.

At that time I met my future wife at a costume ball for students. She was a norwegian girl with a very troubled childhood behind her. She got pregnant in 1994 with our son just a few weeks after we started going out together.

Early days of web development

I have done a lot of bad decisions in my life. One good decision was to start working with web applications in 1995. One bad decision was to only be an employee and not start a company myself. I was an early employee at one of the first consultancies specialising in cd-rom and web development. Often you would get the feeling of being a genius developer. One day I would invent a wiki-like system for internal use and another day I would invent a content management system. The content management system became used by many big Norwegian companies. Web development suited me well. I enjoyed both working with designers on graphic design and coding.

First attempt at family life

Work was just to fun and at home my wife gave birth to our daughter in 1996. The marriage became more and more problematic. I never understood how difficult my wife's childhood had been. My wife eventually started working as a project leader. In the fall of 2001, after the dot com bust, I experienced both loosing my job as a manager for 16 web developers, loosing my house and a loosing my wife. All within a couple of weeks.

Second attempt at family life

Suddenly loosing your job, house and wife all at once can be a revealing experience. It sort of can't get much worse than that. So it was game over and time to start all over again. Soon I found a new job at the University of Oslo as a web developer. One of the perks of working at the university was being able to workout and study during working hours. At first I studied art history. I really do love architectural history. Then I took an master in computer science in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. At the same time I met a half french girl living in Geneva, Switzerland. She had completed another master degree in architecture and was working on her phd thesis. Half a year after we got together she moved back to norway. The year after she got pregnant with our daughter. My two kids from my first marriage didn't go along well with my new girlfriends temper. Eventually both of my kids stopped living at my place to live permanently with their mother. I was hard for me and probably even harder for my eldest kids. Especially my eldest daughter, who was only 10 years old at the time.

Starting over

Three years ago our son was born. When he was only 8 months old I moved out. Committed to not experiencing another failing relationship I just got burned out after a while. At the moment we both live in the same neighbourhood and I pick up the kids a couple of times a week. I still think the mother of my youngest children is beautiful, but we have some serious issues.

Hacking in the 2010s

The last year I've been working as a freelance frontend developer. There are so many things that are very exciting to work with. Chat bot developer is probably going to be a common profession in a few years time. As people are using more and more web sites and phone app's, users will eventually reach a limit where it's simply not practical to remember how to use it all and start chatting with their computers instead. Cryptocurrencies will bring people across the planet even closer together as it's get's easier and cheaper to transfer money. Artificial intelligence used to mean simple language processing, pattern matching and simple computer learning. Now artificial intelligence with huge learning sets and sophisticated deep learning algorithms are solving interesting problems.

And at last. With erlang, elixir, react and redux we finally get pure functions everywhere that can be replaced in runtime.

Wrapping it up

So history is repeating itself. Friends try cheer me up by telling me to go for a third round of family life. I don't know. Computer hacking is like sex. First it's just a lot of fun, but if you're only doing it because you get paid, then it's not that fun anymore. Being an independent contractor gives me time to do more interesting fun stuff again.

This is Thomas Flemming's first posting on steemit.