My Developer Backstory

The Beginning

As long as I can remember, I have always loved games . Back to the NES and Gameboy, then onto Gamecube and Playtstation (so many good memories), and lately on PC & PS4. Over the years, messing around with all sorts of systems and games is probably what unearthed my desire to solve problems, think critically, and have a desire to optimize. In particular, the part of this journey relevant to this post deals with Minecraft.

Eww Minecraft, What is that doing in my feed?

My best friend and I played Minecraft for what seems like forever, dipping our fingers into every kind of minigame, adventure map, server, and fun shenanigans we could get into. We made functioning shops, sky blocks, redstone farms, and here is where it gets interesting; we began to dabble in custom servers learning how to admin & mod along the way.

This was my first real interaction with a computer that involved commands and some basic programming concepts. It became obvious that the more I knew, the easier things would be to do whether it was using worldedit to create a castle, or creating a massive sphere of TNT to completely wig out everyones' computers. I organically learned to break tasks of magnitude into bite-sized pieces, and then translate each part into concrete commands the computer could interpret. While wading through abounding waters of server configs, modded clients, squeezing every last frame-per-second out of my laptop I could, and a bunch of fooling around with the console, I guess I began to brush up against my real interests in computing.

funny side note, right around this time my Dad offered me a laptop with a version of Ubuntu installed. I booted it up, instantly hated how it looked and felt, and immediately rejected the poor machine. Ironic, considering a beautiful 👌 version of Ubuntu is now my daily driver as a Computer Science Student.

Ahhh no more spoilers!

Highschool

Anyways, the story continues throughout Highschool, where I still enjoyed a few types of gaming and was starting to float farther into the ocean of possibilities that is computing in general. Youtube and the internet began to be more important to me, and out of pure curiosity I took lessons in JS, CSS, and HTML on CodeAcademy because that's mainly what they offered back then. I started fiddling with Chrome Devtools, and 90% of the time had no idea what I was looking at.

It was at this point I knew just enough to change the look or text in a webpage, and if one of my friends left their laptop unlocked, I was definitely going to mess with it in some harmless way. One good example of this would be changing the background of a site they were on to something a little more lively:

Time passed, highschool was coming to a close, and university was breathing down my neck asking what I wanted to do with my life. By this point, I adopted the role of the Family Computer Dude in the same way many other developers have. For a brief time, I sold my technological services to Family, Friends, and other people in Fiverr, to get a little experience and see what that was like.

Graduation came and went, I shipped off to university and ultimately ended up deciding on Computer Science. I began to care more about (here is your $5 word of the day) Autodidacticism and coincidentally dove deeper into the developer world.

Over this time, I taught myself more about web-dev, general coding, and all kinds of neat things to do with computers. Also, I took the plunge and switched to Linux as a daily driver (no regrets there). For the past few years, I have been chipping away at my degree requirements and learning more than I ever thought possible. The more time and energy I put into courses and self-learning, the truth in the quote below becomes more apparent.

“The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” - Aristotle

Present Day

With that note, we are just about up to present day. I have a remote development job that I enjoy greatly, am always looking for opportunities to make friends and learn, take notes almost exclusively in markdown, have pretty much abandoned almost all non-dev social media, use Linux unironically, and can officially say I know how to exit Vim.

What can I say, I am...

👌 Just a Raspberry Pi loving, vim customizing, Unix ricing, RGB keyboard/mouse having, class A computer science struggle-bus passenger, developer extraordinaire 👌

Lastly, I want to end this story like a few others I have read

What's your Developer Origin Story?