My name is Ervin Tombak. I am a 21 year old studying in a junior software developer course at Tartu Vocational College (otherwise known as VOCO). Born and raised in a Järvamaa small town, there was never enough to do. Luckily for me however, I have had access to the internet for as long as I can remember.

Ever since I started exploring the web as a small child, it has been a big part of my life. I used to spend much of my free time playing browser games, reading forums and community wikis, watching different videos for both entertainment and education, talking to people from different parts of the world through chatrooms and social media. But all the while I was having fun on the internet, I had a even stronger interest in how it all worked. I tried figuring out how the games I played worked, how to make them myself using things like GameMaker Studio, I learnt how to set up emulators, I tried figuring out where the quirks of the social media and chatrooms I was using came from, I used basic html to set up my profiles on places that would allow it. Unfortunately until enrolling at VOCO, I've not had the opportunity to learn about it properly, but now that I have it has reignited that child-like passion.

Part of what experience I do have with programming comes from secondary school, during which I was recommended to become an assistant teacher in our school's robotics club. I helped teach mostly elementary school students to use simple block programming to program robots. We took part in the 2018/2019 First Lego League competition "Into Orbit", the students under our supervision got a special prize at the competition because despite being the youngest they still participated to their full capacity.

Also in secondary school I got a good amount of experience in design and teamwork as a member of our school's newspaper Koikera team. I was our editor, so it was my job to take all of the stories and articles our reporters and put them together into the newspapers we published every season of the year. I would design all of the issues of Koikera myself with input from our reporters. I also designed the logo used by Koikera. The one of the first issues of Koikera I edited won a special award for composition and design at a Estonian school newspapers competition.

I have enrolled at VOCO in a very peculiar time. A lot has changed, and is continuing to change in the programming world. It's very likely that we are at the advent of the era of AI and I think I have the drive and passion to keep up with these changes and adapt to them.