My Progamming Journey

As a life-long programmer, everyone has to start somewhere. Some people get into it from a computer science class in highschool, or from a website they had to make for a school project. For me, it was when I was 8.

A youngin

As a child I had been in and out of sports, and hadn't found anything I liked to do. But, I loved playing video games, almost to a fault. I'd get home from school, fire up my xbox 360 and play for hours until it was time for dinner and bed. My mom was worried that I would continue this streak late into my teens, and become a lazy adult that just wants to play video games, so she signed me up for a weekly camp at GameU, a school that teaches kids how to make video games.

GameU

The GameU summer camp was full of kids like me, no hobbies other than playing video games, but we all were interested in creating them. That is where I first learned to code. I spent a week creating a terrible platformer on GameMaker studio (A game engine that I denounce to this day). GameU taught me the basics of programming, the love of making something work, and the depressive state one can achieve from not being able to make something work. That is also where I met Jake, my tutor who would teach me for the next 3 years. Here's a game that Jake has been working on lately

Highschool and beyond

GameU was great, but eventually it shut down. The children of Columbus just weren't interested in making games (and letting young kids around computers strong enough to run unity isn't always a fantastic idea). So as I was headed into highschool, I left gameU and continued my programming journey independantly, up until Otterbein, where I became president of the computer science club (now dethroned), and became a Software Developer / Windows System Administrator intern for a company called Cantata Health.