Introduction to My Development Skills and Career

Born a year before the release of Windows 95, I can't quite pinpoint when my fascination with computers began. It just always seemed to be there. From a young age, I became thoroughly proficient with every legacy OS of that era: Win95, Win98, WinME, Win2000, WinXP, and WinVista. Young as I was, I understood and operated them all at a solid level. Back then, I knew my way around all of it - WinME, which would completely lock up the moment the power so much as flickered, and Windows 2000, whose source code Microsoft eventually made public. Oh, and this is kind of a silly one, but I still remember multiple Win98 serial numbers to this day. Ha. I must have memorized them so young that they're just permanently stuck up there, and can't get rid of them even if I tried.

If I had to trace the origin of my interest in programming, it would probably be my desire to build something like the MSPaint that came with Win95. My very first programming language was Pascal - primitive by today's standards, a procedural-oriented relic - but it was widely used at the time. For a good while I was completely obsessed with it, spending my days staring at that iconic blue background with white and yellow foreground text on the crt screen.

From there I explored Visual Basic, Delphi, Flash Script, and various other approaches before finally arriving at C — the true language of programmers. I was 14 years old when I first picked up C/C++. Obviously I wasn't old enough to start a professional career, so I pursued it as a hobby, happily spending my time with C, C++, Windows NT Programming, APIs, MFC, and all manner of libraries. During this period I built apps like a VNC-style remote desktop tool using the Windows API, and gained hands-on experience with threading and asynchronous processing. For someone so young, it was a substantial body of experience.

After that, I spent a lot of time on Fedora using KDevelop with the Qt library — though I can't recall the exact version. Once I started working professionally, I continued with Qt across Windows and Android, among other platforms. I genuinely enjoyed KDE development as well.

One thing I remember clearly. I first encountered HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and ExtJS around 2010. Before that point, nearly all my spare time outside of school was consumed by programming — fingers on the keyboard, always building something.

My very first assignment as an intern was building Tetris - a competition among new hires to see who could write the shortest, most performant code. That was followed by a project to port two SWF Flash games to Cocos2d.

During that project, something happened that I'll never forget. A power outage killed the entire office and my machine included. At the exact moment I was pressing Ctrl+S. When the power came back, my main.cpp was gone. Nearly a month of work, wiped clean. Not even a #pragma in sight. Total devastation.

The company hadn't allowed SVN access for interns' projects, so I'd been working locally with WinRAR as my "version control." Looking back, that's a bit embarrassing to admit — but regardless, that first year at the company was genuinely grueling.

My next assignment was building an offline dictionary app for architects. Dictionary software turned out to be more complex than expected; only later did I realize corpus theory was at the heart of it. I also developed an application using the Autodesk Revit SDK, which taught me how to work with third-party SDKs.

Through a personal connection, I moved on to a startup. Understaffed by nature, the company handed two or three simultaneous projects to each developer. That environment pushed me into a wide range of new territory: building internal management systems with ASP.NET, IIS, and Node.js (around v0.4, as I recall); developing a video conferencing system with WebRTC; and building another conferencing client in WinForms.

And the mobile market was still booming at the time, so I also got extensive experience with Cocos2d and Cocos3d. When CocosCreator completely overhauled the development model in 2019, I stepped away from Cocos entirely - though looking back later, I could see how much easier they'd made things.

I also spent a long stretch doing hybrid mobile development with Cordova and Ionic, with Framework 7 as my go-to framework. During this period I established a solid understanding of deployment through AWS, and got my first exposure to AngularJS and ReactJS — both of which have evolved enormously since then.

This company gave me some of the most memorable experiences of my career. I did Android APK reverse engineering and Unity APK reversing. I served as PM on the development of TSolution, an office suite built on top of LibreOffice, where I led the HWP module development and the main UI. The LibreOffice class and module workflow documentation was so extensive that when I printed it out and hung it on the walls, it covered three full walls.

I also contributed to the KakaoTalk desktop client, led development of a remote internal security management system, built a product sales platform, and — right around the time TensorFlow and Keras were emerging — developed a CAPTCHA auto-recognition and bypass program.