Coding has been an exciting part of my life. I’ve learned a lot about computers, hacked together some little projects, and met some great people along the way. Here’s my story of how I got started with coding.
The beginning
It was 2020, and the pandemic had locked everyone indoors. As a primary school student stuck at home, staring at Google Meet for 8 hours straight was boring.. Eventually out of boredom, I started poking around for ways to make online classes less miserable. That’s when I discovered Google Meet Plus, a Chrome extension that added things like DMs and reactions to Google Meet. I recommended it to basically everyone, even my teacher.
One day, for absolutely no reason, I decided to copy and paste random elements from DevTools into the DM feature. Something like this:
<button>Click me!</button>To my surprise, it worked. I sent a button to a friend and confused them so much that I kept going. I started pasting random HTML elements: marquees, animated div that fills up the whole screen and even <script> tags that reloaded the page and kicked people out of the meeting. It made the endless online classes way more entertaining.
To this day, I’m still quite surprised that it worked. To those unfamiliar with web development, I basically exploited a dangerous vulnerability called Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). I literally could have steal everyone’s Google account if I knew what I was doing. Thankfully, I was just a kid who can’t tell the difference between HTML and HDMI.
That was my first real interaction with code.
Learning more
That experience got me curious. I started watching programming tutorials and building small things: simple Pygame projects, Discord bots, and some basic websites with HTML and CSS. I was hooked.
Eventually I found the Godot game engine and made my first “real” game without following any tutorial: basically Pong, but with horizontal movement. After that, I discovered gotm.io, a site where you can host Godot games and join regular game jams. I joined a few, won a couple, and made some friends I still keep in touch with today.
The gotm.io platform went down around 2023, but it really kickstarted my passion for coding and game development.
Where I am now
I’ve built cooler projects, made tools that are actually maintainable, and learned a lot more about lower-level programming. I’m also an active member of the Hack Club community, which has introduced me to even more smart, interesting nerds people.
Right now I’m learning more about operating systems, working on new projects, and trying to participate in more events and hackathons.
My family doesn’t have a background in tech, I started later than many of the people I know, and I still have quite a lot to learn. But I’m proud of how far I’ve come, and I’m excited to see where this path leads next!