Who am I.

My name is Sylvain Lafrance. I'm from Québec, Canada.

Before beginning — English is not my main language. Please excuse any mistakes I could have made in my posts.

As far as I can remember, I always liked electronic and computer stuff. My first contact with a "computer" was in 5th or 6th grade, when a teacher brought a Commodore 64 to class to show us what a computer was. At the time, having a computer at home — or even at school — was extremely rare.

The beginnings

I got my first computer in the early '80s. It was a Commodore Vic-20 that my parents bought me. I remember learning to type on the keyboard, hunting across all the keys with my finger to find the right letter. I didn't even have a dataset yet, so you can guess that my little programs were erased every time I turned the computer off. But it was okay — I was mostly learning to type and trying to understand a few basic commands.

A few weeks later I bought a dataset, and I was finally able to build bigger programs (under 3.5 KB!) and save them. All of this connected to a 12-inch black-and-white cathode TV.

Like most people who started with a Vic-20, I saved all my money and upgraded to the C64 with a floppy disk drive. We were a handful of guys at school with C64s, swapping programs and games. It was also the era of punching a hole on the side of a 5.25-inch floppy disk so we could use both sides.

By the end of 10th grade I bought an 8088 clone with a 10 MB hard disk and started coding more seriously. In the next few years I learned Turbo Pascal. Even after those 30-ish years, Turbo Pascal is still my preferred language.

Shareware

I upgraded computers often in the following years and eventually left DOS for Windows 3.0, like most people at the time. Even as Windows grew, I kept coding in Turbo Pascal.

I wrote a shareware program called HD-Driver — a file manager for copying, moving, and erasing files. I sold a few copies in the US and Canada between 1988 and 1990.

Once I graduated in computer science, I was lucky to land jobs where I learned and refined other languages — dBase / Clipper, HyperCard, C, C++, Fortran. As a hobby I was still coding in Turbo Pascal and Delphi. No specific projects, just for the fun of it.

Five years later, I slowly stopped coding. I was in my early twenties and I had different interests. I never stopped thinking like a developer, though, and everything I'd learned kept serving me in my system administrator jobs. It's always easier to understand problems when you can imagine how things are coded.

Back in love with coding

My love for coding came back in 2016. I was going through a hard time with anxiety and burnout and I needed something to change my state of mind. I installed Xcode and started learning Swift.

Just between you and me — getting back into coding was really difficult, but so much more rewarding than I expected. A lot of things have changed in 20 years. Fortunately, coding is still coding, and the basic concepts never change.

At first, coding and learning Swift was just a kind of mental therapy. The better I got at coding, the more I wanted to learn. I started building small apps (programs are called apps now), and I published my first iOS app on the App Store a few months later.

It was a very simple game where the goal was to tap the screen to keep a soccer ball above a line at the bottom of the screen. I really didn't care if it was good, bad, or how many downloads it got. What mattered was being able to say I had an app on the App Store.

Since 2016 I've never stopped coding for iOS devices. I've published a few other apps since then.

Coding is my hobby and my passion. Some people like to paint, work wood, or play golf. Me — I like to code. Coding is good for my mind, helps me focus on a single thing, and drastically calms the little monkey in my head.

I hope you liked my story, and maybe it will inspire you in some way.

Don't forget — there is no age to start writing your first lines of code.

First published July 8, 2020. Last updated May 9, 2026.