Why does this blog exist?

I started programming on my Commodore VIC-20, which i later sold for way too cheap on eBay. So my first steps where CHIP magazine copying line by line - not recommended! Than i learned a bit in QBasic on my cousins computer (some i486 and win 3.11 - did you know that the 'shop employes' thought something big is going to happen, when ordering a graphics card with 2MB!? Hand scanner and Corel Draw 4 - my cousin was indeed talented af). Later in formation, we started coding in turbo pascal; after that or some time in parallel, we started learning assembler (ASM) on an MFA 8086 and around this time i got my very own first computer. My first computer was a nightmare - W95(b), the one with USB support. I nearly reinstalled my system once a week, because some drivers weren't good. There's no need to talk about the Intel 166 MHz MMX CPU or the 16 MB RAM. As soon as possible, i got my hands on Wolfenst...turbo-pascal for DOS and our lecturer wrote a complete working MFA 8086 simulator in turbo-pascal, which was also able to connect and control the real machine - my mind was blown, like all them others.

I was that much into ASM, that i started working on the first shareware-patches and stuff like...hacker stuff, you know.

Some time later, we started using the windows version of turbo-pascal aka DELPHI - i guess it's the direct successor of pascal or turbo-pascal. I liked the drag'n'drop coding part and that you simply could select the action and behavior by a dropdown menu. Everything was pretty simple. At home i used Delphi to create some 3D benchmarking applications. Best part with Delphi: it came with an installation wizard for your applications - i used it for my cracked software. I prefered coding in QBasic, because in the early years, i wasn't able to handle the strange VIC-20 keyboard and GWbasic (actually the DOS version or simulator? for Commodore Basic).

After a while i was bored in programming/coding and startet using Photoshop and with photoshop: HTML Coding again - but it's a markup language, where you're describing what you want your website to look like. Design and HTML/CSS worked fine for a couple of years (1998 - 2001), but soon needed JavaScript and Macromedia Flash (which was acquired by Adobe in 2005). Flash was very complex, and I've only mastered Flash4 and it's scripting engine. In 2001 I was employe to a very nice internet company (free internet for everybody...) and my first gf broke with me - so i got into php, intensified mySQL knowledge and unearthed my Delphi again and had some nice ideas for our software (the dial-up software). I've presented my vision and ideas to my colleagues and the next generation dial-up was ev15en presented to our newest partner: prosieben media AG.

At this time I was very proud of myself, because everything i thought of worked flawlessly. I even started selling scripts on demand, whatever was asked for, i wrote it - as simple as that. I was also a part of the OS:Commerce team, which was very exhausting. I also started a new version of the CMS called Limbo, which I've never finished, instead i wrote some simpler CMS like systems.

Some time in 1999 i also started discovering different operating systems. I even beta tested w98, which was working extremely well and didn't needed that much additional drivers. In 1999 and 2000 I upgraded my system to the maximum i could afford and get my hands on (intel 266 MHz, more RAM, voodoo 3dfx, creative soundblaster...) and tested LiNUX and BeOS (which still is around as HAIKU). And I also got a copy of QNX for devs working on my system. But after all, I wasn't able to drop windows completely - till this date. I silently rewrote a linux kernel sound driver for my Yamaha OPL3Sa3, because there was only the drivers for OPL3Sa2 which was not working. My main operating system is canonicals Ubuntu (ubuntu gnome, when unity desktop was default) for now about 25 years now.

In the years after 2012 I discovered microcontrollers and arduino in 2013/2014. I learned C++ this way and didn't even noticed, because the OPL3Sa2 driver part i had to modify was ASM and some registers. The thing with Arduino and C++ was as follows: I've seen my first multi-rotor fpv video on youtube, discovered MultiWii and had to learn Arduino/C++ and that hit me. I also tried stm8 and stm32 boards, but I can't remember any lasting project beside my baseflight quadcopter. I loved flying and fpv is way beyond everything i could imagine, after getting rejected by german military "Bundeswehr" to become a pilot.

So than ESPRESSIF started spreading their ESP8266/ESP8285/ESP32 and all their derivatives and they're all so much more capable than the atmel 8-bit chips. The first ESP chips (non 32) only had wifi, which started a revolution in smart home and IOT devices. With ESP32 and their derivatives, we also got bluetooth. Companies like lilygo started combining the chips with development boards, which contained usb serial to ttl interfaces, broken out GPIO and some got OLED displays in different sizes and than there's LoRa added. Now you can buy so many different dev boards with any kind of radio transceiver and displays of any kind for cheap. But also the diy community started developing anything you can think of and mostly buy for expensive prices, like weather forecast devices, synthesizers or even oscilloscopes with a 1MHz precision (there was an stm32 version too!) with web interface and bluetooth connection. That's where I started again and with C++ and learned to use platformio (in Codium). I implemented OLED screen for all ESP32 based ExpressLRS transmitters, which I was not credited for (shame on you!).

I started using github on January 22 in 2013 and raised my first issue on "an ERROR 500 in danpros/htmly", so i was pretty german at this point. In 2017 I started finding some issues in a flight controller and asked for some implementations for boblight on ESP-01 which later was replaced by WLED and their complex and all in one system. In 2018 I started using github for my projects and in 2019 I used it more and more to backup projects that were removed by original coders and to backup my own projects. Some projects are a good ideas but never finished, some needs an overhaul and some are just another name of an existing repo (like my ambilight repos).

In the days when I was working for a company with strange behaviors (like: timed pause for everybody), I uploaded my work (menu plugin for shopware 5) to github to document my work, which was exact the right moment, as they fired me for "NOT doing my work". I got a bit of a specialist in merging from OS:Commerce aka XT:modified to shopware 5 and helped some people in the shopware forum, where i need to find my work again to publish on github.

So this is my coder/hacker/programmer life and why this blog is important to me and maybe to you!?