From Amstrad to Azure: My Coding Journey

My first real exposure to programming was on the Amstrad CPC. You didn’t boot into a desktop environment or open an IDE. You turned it on and were dropped straight into BASIC, greeted by a blinking cursor and endless possibility. It was immediate and honest. If you wanted something to happen, you wrote the instructions yourself. A simple loop printing text endlessly across the screen felt like power. That direct feedback loop — type something, run it, see what happens — taught me early that computers aren’t magic. They are precise, literal machines that reward clarity and punish ambiguity.

Working within the limits of an 8-bit system meant learning that memory was precious and performance mattered. There was no hiding behind layers of abstraction. If something ran slowly, it was your fault. If it crashed, it was your mistake. Those constraints weren’t frustrating; they were educational. They forced creativity and discipline in equal measure. You learned to think before you typed, to optimise by instinct, and to respect the hardware.

Then came the leap to the Commodore Amiga, and everything felt bigger. The graphics were richer, the sound fuller, and multitasking felt almost futuristic. The Amiga wasn’t just a computer; it was a creative machine. Watching demos push the hardware beyond what seemed possible planted something in me that never left. The demoscene mindset — understand the system deeply, squeeze every ounce of performance from it, and make it beautiful — shaped how I think about software to this day.

As the years passed, coding shifted from hobby to profession. BASIC gave way to C, and eventually to C#. Desktop software evolved into web applications. Physical media became digital distribution. Today, I work primarily within the .NET ecosystem, building applications with ASP.NET Core, creating interactive user interfaces using Blazor, and experimenting with cross-platform development through .NET MAUI. Instead of loading programs from floppy disks or cassette tapes, I deploy applications to Microsoft Azure, where they can scale globally in minutes.

On the surface, the difference between an 8-bit home computer and cloud infrastructure is enormous. We now measure memory in gigabytes instead of kilobytes. Deployment takes minutes instead of hours. Frameworks abstract away complexities that once required intimate hardware knowledge. Yet the core principles remain unchanged. Logic still matters. Clean code still matters. Performance still matters. And curiosity remains the driving force behind all meaningful learning.

When you’ve wrestled with strict memory limits, you develop a deep respect for efficiency. When you’ve manually tuned code to squeeze out smoother animation or faster execution, optimisation becomes second nature. Even today, when refining a database query or reducing unnecessary allocations in C#, I can feel those early lessons guiding my decisions. Constraints may look different now, but they still exist — just at a different scale.

Back then, I was literally coding in a bedroom, armed with manuals, magazines, and trial and error. There were no online tutorials, no instant answers, no global developer communities at my fingertips. Progress came through persistence. Now I can containerise an application, deploy it to the cloud, monitor it in real time, and iterate faster than ever before. The tools have evolved dramatically, but the feeling is the same: the quiet satisfaction when something finally works, the late-night moment when you fix that stubborn bug, the spark of excitement when you learn something new.

From Amstrad to Azure, the journey isn’t about abandoning the past for the future. It’s about carrying forward the lessons, discipline, and passion that began with a blinking cursor in a bedroom. Retro computing reminds me why I started. Modern development shows me how far the possibilities extend. And somewhere between those two worlds lives the spirit of the bedroom coder — still experimenting, still learning, still building simply for the love of it.