My dad is programmer and I alway wanted to be one too. But I wasn’t patient. I wanted to be a programmer right away without any work. In 2014 I started learning Java from the Czech website called ITnetwork.cz. As I said, I wasn’t patient. Everything I did was copying a code snipets from the courses and trying to compile successfully without thinkig or reading the texts. As I’m sure you can guess, it didn’t really work. This way I finished the course. Of course, after reading the whole course, I didn’t know anything at all.

But the year 2015 chanded everything. I got a book about Scratch for my 9th birthday and I was very interested in it. I was programming in Scratch almost every day. I didn’t stop until a year and a half later, when I started studying for the high school entrance exam. Then in high school I didn’t do programming for a long time. I was just learning HTML and CSS.

The year 2020 was amazing, a lot happened in this pandemic-tainted year. At the beginning of this year I didn’t go to school due to illness and I was bored. So I thought I might give programming a second chance and I started learning Java again. I read all the lessons carefully and everything miraculously worked. I was really happy and it motivated me so much that I learned a lot of things in that year and even switched to Linux.

In the spring, when I was reading something on the internet, I read about Linux. Dad told me more about it and I was really excited. I started looking for materials and figuring out how to install Linux Mint.

I wanted to dual boot Mint alongside Windows so I would at least have some backup if needed. Unfortunately, my old laptop didn’t have UEFI yet and it was quite difficult to get the dual booting to work on MBR with the partition layout I wanted. So I resorted to the decision to delete Windows and completely switch to Linux. I installed my chosen distro in September.

I was thrown into the water and had to learn to swim. I often ran into problems and was constantly looking for tutorials on the internet. But the more I learned, the more I enjoyed Linux.

Over time, I became interested in the GTK apps and I wanted to know how are they made. Because the only language I knew was Java, I was looking for how to use GTK with Java. But I came across something more interesting, the Vala language.

Vala had a similar syntax to Java, so I started learning it. I was gradually getting into it and I started to love GTK. And I even decided to switch to GNOME because it was the home of GTK.

I didn’t want Ubuntu besause of its modifications. I wanted vanilla GNOME. I was familiar with APT, so I was searching for some Debian based distro with GNOME and I found Pop!_OS. Unfortunately, before I could switch to Pop!_OS, they announced that they will switch to their own DE called Cosmic instead of GNOME.

So in May 2021 I decided to switch to Fedora. It wasn’t based on APT, but I figured I would at least learn something new. I also started learning JavaScript and Python on Fedora.

At the end of January 2022 I became interested in the rolling release and do-it-yourself system and I decided to switch to Arch Linux. I managed to install it, but gradually I found that it is not the right thing for me.

After the release of GNOME 42 I really wanted to try it. So I took advantage of being on a rolling release distribution and I updated my system right away. After the update I restarted my computer, but it didn’t boot up again.

I knew that this can happen with Arch Linux and that there are tutorials on how to fix it. But it was an opportunity to switch back to Fedora. The do-it-yourself system, which I liked before, gradually became quite annoying.

Another thing I became interested in were immutable distros. I installed Fedora Silverblue in early 2023 and I think I finally found the right distro for me.

The next language I started learning was Dart in May 2023. I’ve been looking for a long time for a language that will be as simple and convenient to use as Vala, but will also be simple to run on multiple platforms without the need for complex dependency installation. Dart seemed like the right choice. I enjoy writing it and running it on other platforms is not a problem.

This is an edited and updated version of an article originally published on February 15, 2022.