Hi there! I’m a Senior developer called Wouter Carabain.
I’m 40 years old and I live with my lovely wife and my 2 boys close to the German border in the Netherlands in a beautiful city called Emmen. I’ve been developing software professionally for a total of 12 years now. Which I still enjoy doing today.
Brief history
I started to play around with code when I was 14 when I got a copy of Visual Studio 6 from my uncle. This really got me hooked to programming and I constantly wanted to learn more. So every week I went to the library to find some books on Visual Basic 6 to help me learn more things. I made alot of small tools to quickly rename alot of files, resize images and such.
When I was around 16 I started programming in a language called Borland Delphi 7. Around that time I also played this game called Tibia with my friends. I used my programming knowledge to gain an unfair advantage in this game for me and my friends. I’ve built a bot in Delphi which could play the entire game by itself based on the instructions we gave it. It would interact with the game server directly so we didn’t need the client of the game to be open. At one time we managed around 50 accounts at the same time using this bot, which gave us an incredible amount of wealth in-game. The building of that bot gave me an incredible amount of insights in the inner workings of the internet and the underlying protocols used. It also gave me alot of practical programming knowledge which I still use today.
I was around 20 years old when I started getting more interested in the internet. Using PHP and MySQL I started building small websites for myself. Later on I started using frameworks like Zend Framework and Symfony. This was the moment I knew I should start developing software professionally.
I got a few requests from friends to build them some software. Because of that I started my own company called Carabiner Internet Solutions. I know, it’s a great name ;-)! I did a few small gigs mainly for friends and family. It never really took off, mainly because I didn’t really spent time looking for opportunities.
Since then I’ve worked at a few companies and start-ups, constantly working my way up.
Today
Currently I’m working a fulltime job as a Senior Full Stack Developer at SupportBook in the Netherlands. Most of my time at work I spend coding on the SaaS application using Symfony and VueJS.
For more details visit me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wcarabain/
