My story - Chapter 1: Creating a Spider-Man website

I turned 30 this year. Yep, I am part of the 90's generation. Since I was a child I always loved having my family and friends around, playing the guitar, watching cartoons and playing video games. My favorite cartoons were Pokémon, Digimon and Dragon Ball Z. I loved playing Super Nintendo games and a couple of years later the revolutionary Playstation 1 and 2 (I wasn't much into the Nintendo 64).

I was born in a middle class family and although we had enough money to have a good life, we were not rich. As a kid who doesn't always had the best toys, I remember developing a sense of creativity early on. I remember that I was able to create entire cities using a frankenstein of LEGOS and how I created a GameBoy using cardboard where I inserted paper cartridges and let the imagination do the rest. My mother is from São Vicente, on the coast of São Paulo and my father is from São Lourenço da Serra, in the countryside of São Paulo. I also remember going almost every weekend to my grandparents' house in the farm and having many moments in touch with the nature, animals and the simple living style.

I have only one brother who is 6 years older than me. The age difference caused us to like different things and to experience different stages of life. We started to engage more with each other after I turned 18. I spent my entire childhood in a 60m2 apartment in Jardim Ester, a neighborhood located on the west side of São Paulo. I studied at a close private school from 5 years-old until 12, and I consider that the beginning of the teenager period was a key moment in the construction of my journey to where I am today.

My father had a good job as a sales manager at a shower company. However, because it required a lot of travel and allied with other factors, my father decided to quit and look for other opportunities. However, his advanced age didn't help to find good jobs. These changes meant that our living standard had to be lowered and it was the moment when I had to leave the private school that I studied my entire childhood and go to the public one so that we could save more money.

It was a very challenging time in my life. I remember that the quality of teaching was not the same, the school infrastructure was more depreciated and the students profile was totally different. I had to enter the middle of the school year and start to make friends from scratch. Anyone who has changed schools knows what I'm talking about. To increase the level of difficulty I ended up joining the school with a boy who also came from a private school, who was 2 years older (he had repeated the series twice) and started to bully me. His persecution with me was so intense that my parents had to do something about it and talk to the school's principal. Fortunately, after that event, he never disturbed me again and a few months later he left school.

During this period of adaptations and challenges of the public school, I sought refuge in many areas in order to overcome my problems. My family and my spirituality were some of those essential refuges, but there was one that made a lot of difference: learning.

At that time, my brother was working as a web programmer at a technology company. He was also responsible for working on the visuals of the sites using tools such as Photoshop, Flash and Corel Draw. The internet was something that was starting to become popular with chats (ICQ, MSN), portals (AOL, UOL etc), Email (Hotmail, Yahoo!) and faster internet connection coming to deliver a better browsing experience. We had a computer at home with the recently launched Windows XP, and my father encouraged me a lot to learn some of the things that my brother had learned using the internet and the computer as a source of knowledge. Like all teenagers, at first I wanted to spend time on the internet playing games and visiting sites of the cartoons that I liked to watch, but my father invited me to go further: use my time on the computer to learn something new. Supported by my father and inspired by my brother, I started to learn how to develop websites using HTML. I learned many things on internet forums and on a website called Kit.net, which, at the time, made it possible to create and host websites for free. I also read and tried every Photoshop tutorial in a how-to book that my brother had purchased. From all this knowledge my first great product was born: the Spider-Man website.

My website was incredible. It had a black background (background-color: # 000000), full of spider webs, texts explaining who Spider-Man was and links to the best sites about him on the internet. I was happy with the countless GIFs that I put on the site, making it super alive and also a little bit slow (okay, veeery slow). I remember that I showed this site to everyone I knew. I was very proud of my son. Their reaction and even their tips on how to make it better inspired me a lot to go on. It was a remarkable moment for me and this site was the element that I needed in order to dedicate myself more to learn about programming, take free online courses and read more books.

Until the great test moment arrived: my first job.

My brother was helping an acquaintance of ours with his company's website, but he needed to create a pop-up (oohh the 90's world wide web) and my brother was super busy with things to do in his formal job.

He then referred me and said that I would be able to develop the pop-up under his supervision. I remember I worked hours and hours to create the pop-up. My father had just canceled the fast internet connection (again to save money) and we were on the dial-up base. I remember that to uploaded the pop-up that I had created to the server I waited until midnight (because by doing that I'd only paid 1 pulse, who remembers that?) And despite some technical difficulties I managed to solve and deliver the work successfully (my brother, who I should be supervising me, I was already asleep).

Job done! I got 70 bucks! All of that meant a lot to me and it was my first step towards my future professional career.

---

What I learned from these experiences

Every moment of my life has taught me something. I made a list of some of the main lessons I learned from the experiences I had during this phase of my life:

• Find solutions in the midst of challenges: Try to use the problems and difficulties to your advantage. How we respond to challenges can define how happy and successful we will be when we are facing difficulties.

• Find pleasure in learning: We often find learning to be a laborious and challenging task. I was able to find pleasure in learning by using things I liked as a trigger for that. I allowed myself to learn new things and find a purpose in what I was doing.

• Take the first step and dive: All I needed was to take the first step and dive. I was discovering a world that I didn't know existed. How many times do we want to do something and develop bias or false beliefs in our head, such as we don't have time, that something is too difficult or it's not worth it to do it. Breaking that barrier is the first step towards something new that may be meaningful in your life but you don't know yet.

• Share with people: Share your learnings and projects with close ones. Their reaction, whether positive or negative, can help you see things that you were not seeing before. Things that are working, things that can be improved and things that you can learn more about.

• It is never too early or late to learn and start something new: Whether you are 12 years old or younger, or 60 years old or older, it is never too early or late to seek personal development and learning.

Special thanks to people who played a very important role in this phase of my life: My father João, my mother Leila and my brother Thiago.

---