It doesn’t seem like it’s been very long since I started programming, but it’s been almost 5 years now, and what a journey it’s been. I’m about to graduate soon and probably work on or with computers for the foreseeable future, so I wanted to look back on the journey that led me to this point.

I wasn’t one of those prodigies who showed up to 5th grade running Arch Linux and programming in Haskell. I’ll admit, I was always rather fond of computers from my first encounter at the ripe age of two. I remember watching my dad “fix” his old Windows XP PC by pressing the power button when it froze. One day while he was away, I decided I could fix the computer, too. My dad wasn’t too pleased, but now I look back and find it ironic how my first contact with these beautiful and powerful machines I’ve been studying for the past five years was a shutdown.

I didn’t really have much more meaningful contact with computers until I was a bit older, maybe around five. I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I do remember it started with games. Through friends, I found GameGecko, Poptropica, and Runescape. My mom limited computer time to one hour a day, but I’d always look forward to coming home from school and playing games with my brother. Back then, computer meant fun toy.

My brother and I were both naturally curious, always exploring things we learned about deeply. He was more of a tinkerer—puzzles, science experiments. My obsessions were with cars, planes, nature, and disasters. I spent spare time in elementary school learning about ejector seats, shipwrecks, war, space travel, and the complexity of nature.

Programming never really piqued my interest then. At the time, it seemed intimidating. My brother would prank people with batch scripts and shutdown commands disguised as Internet Explorer. I thought that was cool, but programming seemed out of reach, and I wasn’t naturally drawn to it like he was.

The day I decided to learn programming was in the summer of 2016, right before sophomore year of high school. I’d signed up for AP Computer Science. My brother had already taken the class and told me it was one of the hardest he’d taken (thanks, bro). It worked—I was intimidated and wanted to get ahead, so I started watching these Java tutorials. It was boring at first, but after learning how to create a window and draw a rectangle on the screen, something clicked. I had an idea, and knew what to do.

I wanted to make a ball bounce realistically in 2D. I barely knew anything, but nobody was there to tell me it was too hard. I just started trying. Used some if statements to check if the mouse was being dragged, measured drag distance to set velocity, updated the ball’s coordinates, and after several hours, it worked—and I was euphoric.

Looking back, it’s some of the worst code I’ve ever written, full of bugs and bad assumptions, but it’s my favorite project to this day. It represents a milestone: discovering my creative ability. The power to conjure a reality, break it down into components, encode them as rules, and set them in motion inside a machine.

“The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.” — Joseph Weizenbaum

That power is what’s driven me to pursue a career with computers. Not the money, not the clout of working for some big tech company, but the joy of creation, and the desire to use that to make an impact and help others. I’m not sure what I’ll do next, but that’s what’s driven me so far.

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