Why I Do Programming

Summary

This piece was inspired by this post by Aaron Boodman. I remember myself as a calm, quiet kid, happiest when I had a bunch of wires in my hands. My parents used to give them to me as toys along with a screwdriver and an old cassette player I could take apart and try to put back together. I was three years old. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I loved the feeling of exploring the insides of a machine, trying to understand how it works. In first grade, I was introduced to MS-DOS and Logo with a bit of PASCAL. Later, when the school got better computers, I started writing small programs in BASIC: tic-tac-toe, calculators, that sort of thing. It felt magical. When I was 10, I finally got my own PC. At first, I mostly used it for games, but after I got internet access, everything changed. I discovered HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript. This was pre-HTML5, so the web was limited, but I still built a lot of weird and ugly websites. My computer science teacher actually liked them. I even made a bit of money by doing other people’s HTML homework, not just for my classmates, but for my brother’s too. Around that time, I was really into GTA and discovered MTA and SAMP, community-made mods that added multiplayer to the game. I became obsessed with the idea of running my own server with custom mods and rules. That led me to PAWN, a scripting language used in those mods. I wanted to build a world where we could do almost anything, like in real life. A kind of proto-metaverse. Eventually, I discovered Second Life — a fully virtual world with its own economy. It had everything I had wanted to build in GTA. I started creating things: clothes, buildings, scripts using LSL (a scripting language that’s a superset of Lua). I even made some money, converting Second Life currency into real-world cash. But after a while, I realized I didn’t want to create only for a virtual world. I wanted to make something meaningful for people in real life. I was around 16 at the time, still unsure what...