As a developer who has now years of experience with different kinds of programming and markup languages. I’ve had many friends who’ve asked me how or where to start with programming. Just even recently one friend asked me, which is where I got the idea to write about it here. I’m writing this from my own opinion, so if you learned to program and started differently then I’m all ears to hear your story.
Yeah I know this code is’nt pristine, it has gone through 4 different GTA:V multiplayer platforms and I haven’t had time to clean it. Sorry…
I think the most important part of starting to program is having the interest to learn it where it also can’t be profitable interest at first. In my opinion, it has to be somewhat of a self-serving thing to create. I’m giving you an example from my journey. I started to “program” when I
was about 12 years old. My journey began in 2005, I had a computer but it wasn’t fast and powerful. So my game library was very limited to Doom 2, Civilization, Diablo 1 & 2, Warcraft 1, Supaplex, Grand Prix 2 and so on. I think the most badass games which ran barely were GTA 3, Vice City and Oblivion. But as a young kid, you get bored pretty fast when you finish a game. Sooner or later I had a situation where I had nothing new to play because my computer didn’t run anything new and got slower as the years went by.
In about 2003 I remember I had first thought to make games myself, sometime after I thought okay how to start. I came up with an idea to draw a picture of my game in MS Paint. It was side-scroller of some sort. Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of it anymore, the only thing I remember of it is a stick figure who was wearing some sort of hat and holding a briefcase and there was a car in front of him. When I finished my picture then I remember I felt proud of it. But a few moments later I thought “okay but now what?”. After some time I stumbled on some kind of subforum like webpage from neti.ee (it was back in the day like Google to us Estonians but more focused on Estonia’s stuff). It was labeled “Making your own” which had a subcategory called “Video Game making” or something like that. It led me to the Estonians game makers forum which had a name “DMG forum” if I remember correctly. There were about 15 or so 20 active users who made games pretty much all the time throughout the years. We even had competitions and made self-made rewards if you got 1th, 2nd or 3rd place.
You’re a snowman who is shooting some sort of monsters to save Christmas or something like that was the story
I remember I spent all my free time making video games. Must of because I was bullied a lot in school and didn’t socialize with others as much as others did. And when I got my new hobby making games I started to get bullied even more because then I was “computer nerd”. But I didn’t care about it much if I’m honest, yeah I got pissed in school because of it and so on. But in the end, I did what I like to do.
After I elementary school I started making GTA SA:MP game server’s scripts and now I’m scripting GTA:V server’s scripts as much I have time aside from university and other jobs. I started to make those game servers because back in the day there weren’t any people who made quality servers to my standard. But I wanted to play in a better environment, so again I started making my own.
I think what I miss the most was support from my parents. They always saw the computer as the damnation of me. Even when I tried to show them things I’ve made they were pretty much apathetic. Parents mostly told me to not waste my time with this computer nonsense. But I think it was all worth it because now I’m making my living by programming stuff.
When I started then I also had few pauses here and there. With game making and also servers. I got tired of it sometimes and so on, so it’s totally fine if you take some time off even if it’s a couple of months.
Before university when I studied in Tallinn Polytechnic school computers and computer networks then I thought everyone is capable of learning programming. But now when I’m more experienced in programming and by knowing humans I see how some people just can’t think like a programmer. Yes, you can teach people to use certain functionalities and drill basic stuff to get exams done. But if you give some different kind of problem to some random dude to solve then lots of those students don’t know what to do next. Many students just freeze or crash, so it’s not for everyone. Because (at least for me) a programmer is a person who can solve programming related problems even if the person is not familiar with this exact type of problem.