The considerable amount of time we spend working is part of our lives, so it shapes us and we should be able to enjoy it.
And it's also quite fun to reminisce about past work experiences and what has endured in some form to this day.
I am starting this blog series by going back to my first longer-term paid job. It was part-time while I was studying, and for an organisation that is quite far from the typical software engineer's line of employment.
Sure, I know there are a lot of IT people at Netflix :)
But I want to write about something else. About the end of the wild 90s in Slovakia. It was important for a student to earn some money, and it was necessary to do civil service.
I got a great opportunity to work for the biggest film festival in Slovakia. My main tasks were to take care of the website throughout the year and during the festival to provide IT services to journalists and other VIP visitors, the so-called Media Centre.
The second half of the 90s was a time when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. This gave the opportunity to experiment and learn as we went along. And it is a fact that HTTP and HTML are around me to this day. Maybe I'll write a few technical details that I learned here in a later article.
The festival was held during the summer exam period, so hours of intense uploading of film descriptions to the web, followed by even more intense partying, sometimes had to be finished off in the hotel room just before dawn by skimming through a few pages of a physics textbook, so I could skip to the exam in the morning. A young organism can handle a lot.
Other mornings my colleagues and I went jogging in the picturesque spa town of Trenčianske Teplice. Running later became my main hobby, an activity during which I come up with the best technical solutions.
By the way, the magic festival life art-work-fun mix had permanent effect on others, too. Some of my friends who also worked on the festival found their life partners there.
Although I was a student, I was the most qualified IT professional in the company, so willy-nilly, I tried out the role of the "IT department manager". I don't think my subordinates complained. One of them later became a university professor in visualisation (yes, our website had interesting graphics). The other, I guess also thanks to this experience, bounced from studying theatre management into the IT industry for a couple of years. Working surrounded by filmmakers and other artists (who call a paycheck a fee, "honorár" in Slovak) was an interesting experience. I realised very early on the importance of being able to translate from IT-speak to the language of the not-so-well computerised majority.
My life and career have shifted since then, yet I believe I still carry the drive to combine current technology (of the respective time) with the ability to benefit real people in real time.
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