I dont know if this has been asked before or if this may be a little goofy of a question but I didn’t see anything relating to it and I’m kinda curious what the culture of Lemmy is like and what sort of common things people see. ive been paying attention to interactions but nothing is as good as just asking everyone.

  • dan@upvote.au
    10·
    6 months ago

    I’m an Aussie in my early-mid 30s. I’ve been living in the USA for the past 11 years. I’ve been a software developer, mostly focusing on web development, since the late 90s personally and since the mid 2000s professionally. I was an early Digg user, moved to Reddit during the Digg exodus, then moved to Lemmy during the Reddit exodus.

    I believe that people on the internet should own their platform, for example run their own blog or e-commerce site, participate in decentralized services like Lemmy, etc. Opera Unite was something I found very interesting in terms of allowing people to easily run their own decentralized stuff, and I’m kinda sad it never took off. I self-host things like email and DNS.

    I’m a big believer in open-source software and released my first piece of OSS in 2005.

    I love listening to people that are passionate about something and get excited when talking about it. Doesn’t really matter what it is or if it’s a topic I’m interested in.

      • dan@upvote.au
        22·
        6 months ago

        Right in the middle of that range (1990). I started learning about computers when I was around 8 years old. My mum bought an old 486 second-hand, and I spent most of my free time using it. We didn’t have a lot of money, and the computer was a great way to entertain myself without needing to spend anything. I had a bunch of shareware/freeware games, but something that really interested me was the Visual Basic system built in to Microsoft Office. In Excel, I’d record macros then look at the code to see how they worked.

        Eventually, I did some web development work when I was at school. I built quizzes for some teachers - back when Internet Explorer was used by practically every one, and code was often in VBScript rather than JavaScript. I learnt web development by looking at the source code of the sites I used - that’s not really possible these days due to how large and minified/obfuscated CSS and JS files are now.

        I’ve got a copy of one of my sites from 2003: http://www.dansoftaustralia.net/oldest/. Unfortunately a lot of the images are broken. I need to find a copy of them… Maybe in the internet archive.

        I went to university from 2008-2011, with a one year work placement (like an internship) in the third year. After I graduated, I started working again at the same company. In 2013, a recruiter from a tech company in Silicon Valley reached out to me over LinkedIn and asked if I’d be interested in applying. I didn’t think I’d get through the interview process, but I did, and moved to the USA. 11 years later, I’m still working at the same company.

        I’m sure there’s things you’ve done that I haven’t done. You should focus on things you’ve accomplished rather than things you envy about other people :)