Hello World

Oh, the customary hello world post. “Hello, world” was the first set of words I typed in-between html paragraph tags when I started learning to code. I had spent the better parts of the day manually copying every bit of information I could find on w3schools into my notebook (an actual book and not the computer) and by evening, I was ready to put all I had written down on paper into practice on a real computer.

The thing was, I didn’t have a computer at the time but I had a friend who operated a printing press business and had a computer for graphic design needs. The computer was available for use whenever he wasn’t using it — this was mostly in the evenings as he would have moved on to doing other things that needed his attention so while I spent the day browsing the web on my phone and writing down the information in my notebook, during the evenings, I would practice using my friend’s computer.

I remember the excitement with which I used to open notepad (this is a simple text editor on the Microsoft Windows platform) and the joy I felt when I opened the page on internet explorer (this was a browser on the Microsoft Windows platform 😁) to display my very first webpage and all it said was “Hello, world!”.

My friend couldn’t understand my joy — as far as he knew, I just went through a very cumbersome process to display some text on the screen as this was something he could have easily done in Corel draw (the best graphics editor as far as every printing press business on my street was concerned) or Microsoft word (I think Google has a “clone” of this, I’m not sure, you’d have to google it) but I understood that it was foundational and was the start of something great.

In the same vein, here is my first article which I start with the same fervor as my first hello world program.