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However, just working part-time as a computer repair engineer quickly became insufficient. Not challenging enough, not serious enough, not profitable enough. I started looking for an extra job to complement it. I wanted to find something that had to do with programming. At some point (most likely it was in 2004) I joined a small company that was developing small applications for Palm PDAs, Pocket PCs and some smartphones. The applications were simple – organizers, calculators, games. But the flagship products of the company were digital copies of Luxury Swiss Watches on the screens of mobile devices. Quickly enough I got a strong feeling that it was not the serious job I was looking for. Several of my colleagues (and also classmates) had similar feelings. I left the company after less then two weeks and today can confidently say that it was the shortest of my career tracks by now.
Another attempt to compelement my part-time work was re-using, packaging and publishing multimedia applications that I developed during my bachelor's studies. The majority of applications were written in Delphi and became a side-effect of my individual assignments during compulsory courses in social sciences and humanities. However, there were two notable exceptions. The first exception was a tool for making backups of emails and address books. I spent quite some time learning about usability and making the application look professional. I opened a bank account (to receive license payments), learned grounds in web development (HTML, CSS, PHP, Perl and JavaScript) and created an official website. How many people bought my application? Zero. But quite soon afterwards I saw some nice messages in the guestbook. A bit later I also saw a keygen for my application on several warez sites. That part I cannot call as particularly "nice". The second exception was a tool to calculate the bearing capacity of the foundation soil for strip foundations. Why would a student in computer science develop that? First to create a helpful tool for my parents (both of them are civil engineers), then to make it useful for others. How many copies were sold? Three copies, $10 each. I guess, the level of my "success" as a self-employed software engineer could not be called anything but "modest".