Hello world!

I bet almost 99% of software developers started their careers by making a “Hello, World!” example somewhere. It might’ve been a small C++ project in school, an online tutorial, or a friend showing them the magic, it doesn’t matter after all. It’s always the simplest way to show anyone how a computer will obey your written instructions once it’s converted to binary instructions that tell a CPU what to do, how to do it, and sometimes when to do it.

Happily, I didn’t start with this, until today I still remember the very first piece of software I wrote.

"shutdown -s -t 3600"

Roughly 15 years ago, I wanted to get my computer to shut down after a given amount of time. I had a valid reason for that, I wanted my downloads to continue but I didn’t want my machine to overheat. I was living in Egypt and although the stereotype of camels on highways doesn’t actually exist yet the country remains hotter than your high school crush almost 9 months a year.

I reached out to Ahmed El-Deeb, I met him while playing an online strategy game. Although he was losing badly in this game, yet he is one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever seen. He gave me some instructions on how to make a bat file and explained to me what the heck I’m doing.

I started making a bunch of files on my desktop, one to shut down after an hour, another for two hours, and one more for three hours. I think this was the very first time I automated something on a computer. I wanted to cut the repetitive action of me typing shutdown -s -t XXXX every time I’m about to head to school early morning.

I didn’t have any idea how my childish instructions were going to the CPU. I didn’t even know what is CU or ALU or anything. I knew the basics like what RAM and CPU do, but nothing more. However, this was the very first step that took me to a live-lasting – so far – tango dancing with computer software.