oh man

my first “computer” was this vtech precomputer 1000 which had some dumb games but also a basic interpreter

it didn’t have a hard drive or anything though so you had to type programs in (one line at a time) every time you turned it on

but it came with some sweet example programs like a little number-guessing game.  i say “came” but it was actually just in the manual and you could type it in.

i had this thing when i was like 10, possibly younger

then we got a real computer and i found out it had qbasic and off i went

i don’t know when i really “decided” to get into programming.  i was just sort of naturally drawn to it.  it only occurred to me a few days ago, in fact, that maybe i hated high school because i started it just as i was discovering all the things there were on dem internets for me to tinker with, and i’d never actually had a thing i was so persistently interested in before.

and i did what i would advise anyone else do: think of a great idea (even if it’s not actually great), go try to do it, have it come out kinda crappy, keep trying anyway.  i mean, fuck, veekun is coming up on fifteen years old.  i started that thing more than half a lifetime ago.

if you want to get started there’s probably nothing better than a combination of

1. learn python the hard way
2. find smart people to hang around, pay attention to what they care about, ask what they’re doing
3. find a bunch of code on github (preferably for a thing you actually use or are interested in), read it, figure out how it works, download it, try to get it running, try to modify it somehow, maybe even fix a bug

basically y’know just do it

also the hardest thing for me has always been designing the big picture well.  holding all the details in my head is hard, and coming up with architecture that addresses them all is harder.  and i get a little crazy about that sometimes.  but that’s not the sort of thing you probably have to worry about for a while; it’s more something you learn you care about after a few years of hating your past self for writing all this garbage code you now have to maintain.

as everyone knows the two truly hardest problems in computer science are naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors…

anyway yeah idk go build some stuff and also ask me things about programming i will babble forever as you can see