Well, I'll say hi too, considering that I registered today
Haven't been much on the forums until now, really. But anyways!
Hi, I'm Leroy, 24, from the Netherlands.
I often found myself wanting to create websites as a young teen, and that was something that I pursued despite not having access internet connection until years later.
Then I got into console gaming, with a PSX, moved to Gamecube later, and Picked up Phantasy Star Online.
I then got involved with the Action replay gamecube hacking community, and learned how to use a debugger and create cheats for Phantasy Star. At about the same time, I had decided to go enroll at a game dev education, which was a super new thing at the time, where I first got in touch with Visual Basic 6 (..ugh). Oh and game maker (...uhhhggg).
I made some tools in VB for the Gamecube hacking community, before I picked up C++ (as in, they handed me a book on C++), and I taught myself C++ from the book, and online references.
Then they had an indie dev come in and teach us C++ game programming. But I had just bought my first Mac, and his homemade game lib would only support development on windows. A big no-go.
.. So I started messing with SDL, wrote my own SDL wrapper as a compatibility layer around the teacher's library, and learned so much doing that.
Graduated there learning most of the important stuff myself, off the internet, and enrolled at NHTV University of Applied Science straight after. I also did some work as a volunteer, for an online gaming lifestyle publication, where I worked as a columnist and CTO, before quitting to focus on my studies. I loved attending industry events such as GDC, though! Fascinating talks and people there : )
Then I picked up SFML as a friend of mine discovered it, after initially continuing work on my own (by then) 2D game engine in SDL.
So I'm now a 3rd year Indie Game Dev student, with industry and media contacts, and roughly 16+ games under my belt (property of past and present schools, sadly). But I'm also a web developer (your average html, xhtml, css, javascript, php, mysql stuff), know Adobe Flash/Flash Builder with Actionscript3, and picked up Python two weeks ago (good stuff!)
Switched over my latest personal project over from SFML to SFML2, and spent today going through API references, source code, figuring out why my 360 controller refuses to work in SFML2 on Mac OS X (I think I did).
I have to say though, I totally love SFML for it's clean API, and I'm learning interesting new stuff every day by solving problems as I go (which I think goes for a lot of people on here ^_^)
Cool forum by the way. I've never been into the whole mailing list thing that's so frequently used in the open source development community : ) And I'm curious if there's any other dutch guys around
Ok. Time to shut up now.