I Miss K.Mandla

https://kmandla.wordpress.com/

I followed this blog as a teenager, and it made me fall in love with console applications. I discovered Linux around the age of 14 if I remember correctly, after I spent most of my childhood with DOS games from '93 or so, and learned some PHP and Pascal at the age of 13 through online tutorials in English. Console applications like the Free Pascal IDE felt very natural to use with my DOS background, and they ran very well on the old computer we had.

I remember I got a phone call from some cyber security company, at the age of 17, and they offered me a job. They said they found me online, through my open source work, and they had to work really hard to find a suitable candidate. I refused (politely) and eventually started a software engineering career at the age of 23. After a decade of pretty heavy tinkering with computers, languages and kernels, I was able to land a "senior software engineer" job as my first real job.

My passion for programming and small software was fueled by K.Mandla's inspirational blog, and this blog cheered me up every time I couldn't solve a big problem with (what seemed to me like) a tight, elegant solution. It gave me opportunities to learn new things and opportunities to ask "how stuff works" questions.

I really miss it, and sometimes I wonder what my life looks like in a parallel universe without this blog.