Okay, so, “spent my entire childhood”… Where do I even begin? It all started with this old, beat-up computer my dad brought home from work. Thing was ancient, even back then. I remember it had, like, Windows 98 on it. The dial-up sound alone is enough to send shivers down my spine.
My first real project, if you can call it that, was building websites. Nothing fancy, mind you. We’re talking Geocities level stuff here. Lots of bright, flashing text, animated GIFs of dancing hamsters…you know, the classics. I basically lived on those drag-and-drop website builders. Thought I was a total coding wizard, even though I barely understood HTML.
- Started with Geocities and similar drag-and-drop editors.
- Spent hours finding the “perfect” background image and fonts.
- Added way too many animated GIFs.
Then, I got into gaming. Big time. I was obsessed with this one game, and I was determined to create my own mods for it. This is where things got a little…more complicated. I had to actually learn how to, you know, code. I messed around,copied and pasted codes.
I started with the game’s built-in scripting language. Super basic stuff, really. Mostly just changing values and tweaking existing scripts.
Then, I discovered online forums. That’s where I really started to pick things up.
I remember spending hours, days, even weeks, just trying to get a single, tiny feature to work. It was frustrating, to say the least. But when it finally did work? Man, that feeling was amazing.
The Long Road of Practice
The real change happened when I realized I needed to understand what I was copying. So I started digging into tutorials, and I mean really digging.
- Found old, dusty books on programming at the library.
- Started reading through countless forum posts and documentation.
- Tried (and failed) to write my own simple programs from scratch.
It was slow, painful, and often felt like I was banging my head against a wall. But slowly, surely, things started to click. I began to understand the logic behind the code. I started writing my own scripts, not just modifying existing ones. I went from making silly websites to actually building something.
So yeah, that’s pretty much how I spent my entire childhood. Tinkering, experimenting, failing, and then, finally, succeeding.
It wasn’t always pretty, but it got me to where I am today.
