Teenager saving the Swedish Junior Tennis Championships with some perl-magic

Back in my teenage years, the summer vibes 🏖️ at Kämpinge beach were unmistakable. At 16, I juggled my time between being a parking attendant and flipping burgers 🍔 at the adjacent tennis cafe. But, as great as those sizzling burgers were, my heart was truly in tech.

A pivotal moment in 1998 still stands out. The director, Rikard, was in an intense chat in the cafe. The topic? The National Junior Tennis Championship (Svenska Juniormästerskapen, SM) 🎾, hosted by our club, was making a groundbreaking move. For the very first time, all results would be published online, a major change when people used to drop by or call for scores. But there was a hitch: No one knew how to do this. Adding to the pressure, posters showcasing the club’s website address had already been printed and distributed across all the tennis clubs in Sweden, signaling the club’s leap into the digital age.

Seeing a tech challenge, I dived in 🏊. My next few evenings, post the burger-flipping hustle, turned into coding marathons. Thanks to the trusty perl script (hello, /cgi-bin/ days!), I developed a system to upload those match results and accompanying metadata effortlessly while generating the website. Championship day was a whirlwind of emotions, and as serves flew, so did my hopes for the system. To everyone’s joy, it was a smashing hit! That day, amidst cheers and serves, I became the “Computer Guy Hero of the Day” 🌟.

Sometimes, I wonder how that moment shaped my journey into engineering. Who knows? Without that experience, maybe I’d be running a burger joint, just as the AI-generated image hints.

Now, while my summer was about code, tennis, and burgers, over in a Menlo Park garage, a little something named Google was coming to life 🌍🔍.

[AI-generated burger pic 🍔. Amazing how tech evolves, but I think there’s work to be done on those oversized AI burgers. :)]