How I got into Programming

I started doing programming when I was around 10. Back then I was really into GTA: San Andreas. I had the game on PS2 and later on PC. I got in the game so much that I decided that I wanted to create mods for it. There was a weird scripting language that San Andreas used. Its main operation were based on opcodes. Basically, the whole game script was reverse-engineered.

Some script displaying a text on the screen:

{$CLEO}
0ADF: add_dynamic_GXT_entry "TEST" text "BnB"
00BA: show_text_styled GXT "TEST" time 1000 style 2  // Beefy Baron      

The language also contained “jump” commands for easy flow-control. The actual programming with no official documentation available was a real pain though. But at that time I didn’t care, I just wanted to make cool mods.

I was also active on gtaforums.com and helped people with their problems.

Going further

After my interest began to fade for the game, I wanted to learn something different. People on the forum always mentioned this “C++”, which was “really cool and more powerful”. Worth to learn right?

Right?

Well, it was a struggle. I didn’t really take it that seriously. Whily I was happy doing YTPMVs on YouTube mostly, I was playing around in Visual Studio most of the time, coding in VB. Around 2012 I began reading up game development tutorials with SDL. I started a little game where you could fly around with ponies, exactly.

After all this things started to shape. Visions became more clear. A year after I got into C#, which helped in my internship at Siemens. I also did my first game in C# with XNA that had a line count of ~7000. It was really crap code though. Another year after that I found myself rewriting that game in C++, after 4000 lines motivation was lost again.

Happily I found myself into web-development now. I am still learning new languages like Python, JavaScript, Ruby, …

I gained big experience! It is very important to not start a big project and to expect you will finish it in 1 month, its not like that.