My youth

People who aren't from Austria probably can't imagine how I always had to pretend to be someone else in order to survive school. I was always a top student. My teachers therefore believed that I did nothing but study. In reality, I spent at least 20 hours a week working on computer projects. My first article for a German computer magazine was published when I was 10 years old. From the age of 12, I published my own magazine and organized programming competitions. I kept all of this secret from my teachers because I didn't want them to interfere with the design of my magazine or give me worse grades. I always tried to appear as “normal” as possible. I was also operating in a legal gray area because in Austria only adults were allowed to publish magazines. In court, my father would have had to represent me as the responsible party under press law, but thankfully it never came to that.
 
When I told this story to an acquaintance from Hungary, he expressed surprise that Austria was apparently such a dictatorship. In his home country, there were several electronic magazines published by young people.
 
Later, the Mensa Austria association banned me from linking to my private blog in the association's internal forum. The reason given was that they allegedly did not know whether it was permitted to distribute this content in Austria.