One day I was playing a game on my ZX Spectrum micro-computer (I was 9 or 10 at the time) when something unexpected happened. The loader threw an exception and I was presented with a weird listing of words and numbers which turned out to be program's source code. Something told me to mess around with it, I changed a few names and numbers and somehow managed to run the program. It worked and funnily enough, the things I changed in source were reflected in new labels in the app (a football manager AFAIR).

This was early nineties and I had no books, no library, no Internet to learn from (my parents had no programming knowledge either) so I had to hack around. I learned to stop programs just before they finished loading and view the source and learn from it (good old days when no one thought of closed-source and obfuscation).

Soon I started writing my first app in Basic. It was a game where you had to get a dot around a rectangular track. Not a complex one but took me a few days to finish.

Things went fast from then. I learned Pascal and started writing more complex programs on a PC. When choosing a school I didn't even consider anything else than computer science. Got my first programming job in a Warsaw-based software house when 21, while still studying. I learned Java and Linux at that company. Then came a few others and eventually in 2010 I started my own company, a movie analyics startup Filmaster.TV which is all I'm focused on right now.

Spaghetti Monster only knows where would I be now if not for that faulty ZX Spectrum program in my childhood.