Over 20 years ago when I was in high school, a buddy of mine once told me what a dream day would be like: stay at home playing PC games and surfing the internet. At that time, internet was just introduced to our town, and having internet access at home was beyond our wildest dream. Only the cool and rich kids could afford to go to an internet cafe to “surf” and “online” chat with other cool and rich kids.

When my friend tried to explain to me how cool it was to online chat with other people, I was confused.

“So I would need to go to an internet cafe and pay a couple of days of my lunch money to send messages to other people, right?”

“Right!”

“Those people on the other side of the internet need to be also online, right?”

“Correct!”

“So consider I could probably go online for 15 minutes in a week at most at I don’t know what time, what the hell is the chance of me and my online friend are both online at same time?”

Well, in my defence to my stupidity, my imagination was limited by my wallet as a high school kid.

Later I went to college, where I got lot more access to internet and spent lots of time on BBS, email, and online chatting. I learnt a lot about computer hardware and software, and even helped some my friends build and setup their computers. One day, a friend showed me his new laptop: “look, it has Intel Centrino.”

“What is Centrino?”

“I don’t know exactly. It’s something to let you get online wirelessly.”

“Access internet without a cable? How?”

“I don’t know. The salesman said you would need some kind of access point or a wireless router.”

“I didn’t know router could be wireless. Do you have that? Or do we have that in the university?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you have to use cable.”

“Probably, at least for now.”

“You dumbass just wasted a lot of money! Wait 10 years before you can go online wirelessly. Even if you can, I can’t imaging how slow it would be.”

Again, history proved that my stupidity was not a coincidence but something deeply embeded in my DNA. Over the years, I’ve witnessed how the internet access becomes literally ubiquitous, and becomes as important as essential as electricity. It has brought so much convenience to our lives, made so much information and knowledge accessible, and created so many opportunities to businesses.

However, I have always been a consumer of the internet, thinking one day I’ll learn all I need and then start to contribute. The desire of contributing has been postponed again and again every time I have an idea. Sadly I feel I’ll never learn to the level I want to be to create.

Recently I’ve been inspired by a website called thisiget. It’s an interactive math learning website I found and introduced to my son. The quality of the content and the technology to create the interative totally blew my mind. More importantly, I happen to know the creator of it personally. He must have put a ton of effort to create this website and he made all these high quality education content free. This is one of the many things he would leave to the world.

Probably I would never be able to create something as great as his website. But if I want, and yes I want, I need to start now. So, as a ritual all people who loves programming will do:

Hello World!