Hi, I’m Jiří Štefka. A programmer born in 2002, currently studying at FIT VUT.

You can find me on Mastodon, my Gitea instance and Github.

I’m still in my beginnings, but I’m already pretty familiar with Linux (I use Arch btw 😉), I can do some C++ and I’m currently doing C at college.

I’ve also done some C# in the past creating some basic projects while I was studying my grammar school.

Python isn’t a stranger to me and I still use it every now and then to make some scripts. I’ve been trying to use bash more lately so I haven’t veen using it that often in the last year or so.

I can do some basic HTML and CSS as well, but I haven’t used Javascript and/or PHP that much.

How did my programming journey start?⌗

Interests⌗

Well, I was always interested in computers. To be honest I was, and still am, interested in literally anything. Physics, chemistry, I love it all.

I got my first PC when my parents decided to throw out an old one. I was 7 years old at the time and it was an old Windows 2000 desktop.

I took it to my room, with the heavy CRT monitor, found an old Ethernet cable and plugged everything in. I was messing around with PCs ever since.

First time programming⌗

But to get me programming it needed something different. That’s when my sister stepped in. She was already programming, mostly websites, for some time now and she knew how interested I was in IT. So she gave me a nudge in the programming direction.

I don’t remember what year it was but I wrote my first line of code on Christmas Eve. She got me an Arduino. It was a basic kit, labeled something along the lines of: Create your own semaphore.

I thought: what a lame gift. What even is this? I’m not a kid playing with cars and trains anymore, why would she get me something like that? Well, I opened it and I got even more confused. Some blue board with label Arduino Uno was staring at me along with some wires, breadboard (didn’t know what it was at the time), LEDs and buttons.

I took a look at the manual/tutorial and there was something about using a PC and writing some code.

Well I finished the manual that day and started messing around adding my own functionality and stuff.

Since then⌗

I took a one programming seminar (in my free time, not as a subject) where they “taught” C#. That got me into researching programming languages and learning from other places.

Sadly that seminal wasn’t good. All you got was a program you had to make, but they didn’t care about the code at all. They learned me that to make a thing I have to write code but nothing more. My code structure was when Visual Studio creates a function I use it, when Visual Studio creates a file I use it. It’s good for getting interested but I learned many bad habits that I had to unlearn.

The code I made at the seminar is literally unreadable. Luckily I got into some coding communities where people taught me how to make my code way better and I’ve stuck to the advice I got back then ever since. I also passed my new knowledge along to my friends and other people that I could.

The days of Windows are over⌗

I’ve started using Linux because I had an old Intel CPU and CS:GO was lagging on it and running Linux made it playable. It’s not what really drove me to it, and drives to this day, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Since then I’m infuriated at how bad that OS behaves. Every time I help someone fix something I have troubles getting error messages and solutions other than

Just reintall it, duh.

The best example of this is when I’ve got a laptop from an old classmate, but that’s a story for another day.

Since then I grew to like the OS quite a lot. It’s fast, it doesn’t force anything on you, apart from a small bunch (looking at you Canonical), and it’s great for dev work.

And it’s FOSS. If you don’t like it - change it.

Small computer, huge fun⌗

I’ve got myself a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB in 2019 and I made it my first, small, server. I love that little thing. It can do so much more than what it looks like and I’ve proven this by running an obscene amount of services in docker on it. After overclocking and adding a SSD with swap it was able to run about 30 docker containers including Nextcloud, Gitea, OpenProject, and many more.

I’ve also got a Raspberry Pi 3B 1GB from a friend about 2 years later and it’s what’s been running this website until march 2024. It also ran things like Bitwarden and a NUT server for my UPS but it liked to lock me out whenever I ran something demanding. It would come back in few hours as it finished it’s task but it was hard to keep such an old device up for extended periods of time.

In 2024 I retired my Raspberry Pi 3B in 2024 as I bought a new Raspberry Pi 5 to replace my RPi4 and the RPi4 replaced the RPi3. It served me well and I’ll probably make it a media center or something.

Now⌗

As I said, I’m studying FIT VUT. It’s an awesome school and I love it here. I mean it as it’s such a needed break from my grammar school which was, to put it lightly, terrible (for me at least). I just hope that don’t mess something up and am able to finish my studies (my faculty is like grinding in Elite: Dangerous 😅)

Thanks!⌗

for reading my coding story! Hope you liked it. I hope you’re doing well making your dreams come true, I certainly am!

OpenSource⌗

Well, to say I love FOSS would be an understatement. I haven’t been able to support projects financially so far but I’m looking forward to when I can. I’d love to contribute to so many projects once I am at the skill level where I can write some proper code for them. The people surrounding FOSS projects are awesome and really helpful. I’d really love to be one of those people creating something everyone can use and learn from. I like how I can use programs while I’m studying for free and I can pay them back for their awesome work once I’m a college graduate.