Hello Steem!
My name is Pedro, and I'm from #Portugal.
After about a month into #crypto and, being a "product" of this mainstreaming, I have found myself overwhelmed by the speed of the market but aslo extremely excited by the technology behind it.
Cooperation in the Past
I have, since early age, been in contact with computers and the Internet and have always seen it as a world of possibilities and exposure, be it for the good or the bad.
At around twelve I spent a great amount of my time and effort working with photoshop and posting my works mostly in forums, not always related to art or web design or whatsoever. My main exposure platform was the portuguese forum of the online browser space exploration and conquest game "Ogame", where I would post my creative works on a "personal galery" (a thread) and received feedback and praise.
I would also accept orders from other users to make, usually, forum signatures, but also Wallpapers and I even created one or two tutorials regarding some kind of technique that I had become proficient at. I participated in contests and learned alot with all this.
This was very stimulating for me and I have never since interacted in that way in the web...
Eventually I lost interest, my computer crashed and I grew up more and more detached from the Internet and all it gives (except Facebook, Email, and mainstream applications). So, after some 6 years or so, I finally have a personal computer and am able to work and try to get some of that old satisfaction mentioned in this post.
In January it will be 1 year that I finished graduation and made the decision to start working (as a teacher) and at the same time exploring myself and what I want to do professionaly and personaly.
Present
With this #crypto surge and mass adoption, in which I am included I became more and more interested in the technology and eager to participate in some way. I started by buying some bitcoin and just recently did I invest in altcoins, although I have researched and read whitepapers since the begining of my "evangelization".
I try to obey to one simple rule which is:
Never invest in something you don't know!
With this I don't mean you need to be an expert, only that you don't want to make your money dumber than it could be...
I watch daily Youtube videos, read new information, and try to keep up with this crazyness but I have found that something was missing in my ability to understand and also to participate.
I couldn't program and create my own value to the environment of technology I was just discovering!!
So I decided to learn computer science on my own!
Well, this seems rushed...
The fact is that I have always been very interested in creating, and programming was something I have been mildly curious ever since but really never had the time or the means (no PC) to explore it!
I have found out that there is a great #community around coding and also more and more opensource projects which I could become part of and benefit from a similar satisfaction I felt in the Ogame days!
I don't want to go to college to learn this important skill and am right now learning C from a book my father (also a self-taught programmer/web designer) had here at home and planning my no-college #graduation, almost entirely based in open courses from platforms such as edX, Cousera, Udacity, MIT Opencourseware, etc. and also from very cheap courses from Udemy. Similar to how these guys did:
@spencercornelia
@davidventuri
I will be posting more or less regular updates of my progress and also some ideas about life and philosophical, psychological subjects that I like to think about.
#Steem is my platform of choice for my blog, not only because I really like the idea behind it, the community, and the possibilities of creation using my (to be aquired) coding abilities, but also the monetary incentive for posting here.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post and feel free to comment, upvote or resteem it!!
Here are two little works I did with the opensource image editor GIMP to help me here in Steem. If you like, you can use them, but please put a link in the end of your post to credit me for it. You know, community =)
