Michael Sasser

I’m a little bit over 30 years old and I’m from Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. I never quite know what to tell about myself, as I’m fairly boring. I like to watch a film or two, preferably fantasy or sci-fi and I listen to rock and metal all day. I’m into electronics and programming.

Why I’ve created the Python room/community on Matrix #

I’ve created the Python room on Matrix because the room, which was already there, was abandoned by their moderator and filled up with spam. Later on the old Python room was closed by the Matrix team and users started to join the newly created room.

You can find more details in our “Changelog”.

How I got into Programming #

I actually got into programming through gaming. In 2004, when I was still young, we hosted numerous LAN parties with friends and played round-based first-person shooters, in basements and barns, all night long. At some point, we all had internet access and could additionally play from the comfort of our homes at any time. Renting game servers directly was too expensive. That’s why I decided to rent a dedicated server with Debian, the first Linux distribution I used. That server was not very powerful, so a graphical interface for setting up the services was out of the question. So, I learned to use Linux with man pages and some help in forums. Over time, the server grew, and I added an e-mail service, a website and a forum to various game and communication servers. Because the maintenance effort was not insignificant, I got into writing bash scripts. However, bash scripts easily become confusing with increasing complexity, I decided to look for another solution. Accordingly, I started to learn Java, which I learned about through TV commercials. Yeah, I know… Java. It seems I was young and quite misdirected.

Although I didn’t like Java very much, I was able to solve many problems with it. However, I’ve always tried out other languages along the way.

How I got into Python #

In 2008, I got in touch with Python from time to time. Python as a programming language was easier to write, more readable, and the community around the language was growing “exponentially”. So, I decided to give it a try. While learning it, I re-implemented most of the programs, I wrote in C, Java, and Perl in Python 2.6, and I loved it.

At first, I wasn’t a big fan of Python 3, when it came out. But it got better over time. I switched when Python 3.3 was released towards the end of 2012 and I never looked back.

Which Programming Languages I Use #

Over the years I stumbled across many languages, mostly out of curiosity, but I’ve always stuck to Python, Rust, C, and some good old bash scripting. Most of the languages I tried out for a few weeks or months, I forgot faster then I learned them. I could probably still read them, but writing would be a whole other subject. Python is my main programming language. Rust replaced C almost entirely. Only for embedded systems, I still use it.

Contact #

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via one of the links below my avatar.