I’ve been obsessed with computing for as long as I remember.
In this three part series, I’ll be sharing my journey with computing — from my first Scratch projects in primary school to where I am today.
My first experience with programming was in P3.
My primary school, which was newly established as a “future school”, was one of the first to introduce the Personal Learning Device (PLD) programme. As such, I had access to a laptop at an age younger than most of my peers.
The laptop’s specs were questionable, having an Intel Pentium and 4GB of RAM. But it lasted surprisingly long (until the charger head broke off).
Scratch
In P3, I was introduced to Scratch. I instantly fell in love with its intuitiveness and quickly proceeded to create games using it. They would often involve my interests at that time, such as Kamen Rider and Pokemon.
Over the next 2 years, I would create projects and host them on Scratch under the user kamenrder9.
I don’t exactly remember where I first got the inspiration of making Kamen Rider belt simulations in Scratch from, but I believe it came from the Adobe Flash games on Deviantart that I used to play.
The idea that dragging and dropping blocks could create so many creative opportunities had fascinated me back then. It was truly amazing how Scratch allowed me to bring my ideas to life and to share them with the community.
WebDev
During the school holidays, I happened to visit the library and chanced upon this book:
I picked it up and started learning basic web dev that same day. However, either because of my negligence or unclear instructions from the book (probably the former), I had no idea what an IDE was. I had to painstakingly type out everything in Notepad, including all the mismatched tags.
The project files are long lost, but I still clearly remember my first project being a fandom clone of Kamen Rider with the most eye-jarring colours and the most basic UI.
From P5 to P6, I also worked on a few Scratch projects together with my friends. Those remain one of the fondest memories of my time using Scratch.
GameDev
In P5, I developed an interest in game development. I felt restricted by Scratch and wanted to do more. After doing some research, I found myself downloading Unity on that same laptop mentioned earlier — the one with a Pentium and 4GB of RAM. Needless to say, it was a painful experience.
Unity on the school laptop. (Jul 13, 2019)
For a period of time, I used my mom’s Macbook Pro to learn C# and Unity, and eventually convinced my parents to buy me a proper laptop. I got a Dell Inspiron 5490 with 20GB RAM and a 10th gen i7.
Over the next few months, I developed countless Unity projects with it and eventually published my first game on the Google Play Store towards the end of the year. Shoutout to Brackeys and Blackthornprod for making gamedev so accessible and fun at that time.
The game was rather simple. In all honesty, it was largely a copy of one of Blackthornprod’s tutorials. But I learnt a lot from the process. I had to learn to debug, learn how to add Unity ads to my project and finally learn how to publish my game on the Play Store.
First Unity Game I published
I only made a single dollar from ad revenue, but that one dollar meant everything to me (even though it was below the minimum to withdraw). It was proof that I could create something people actually used.
Most importantly, publishing my game gave me motivation to further my passion in computing. I felt a sense of accomplishment seeing 100+ people download a game a little P5 kid made in his room, with nothing but his laptop and YouTube. It taught me that I could truly learn anything if I set my mind to it, which continues to guide my learning today.
In 2020, the pandemic hit. It was a wonderful time for me. I now had all the time in the world to continue my coding adventures (and play amongus with my friends over Discord).
Script-kiddie + Linux
Ethical hacking was something that sounded really cool at that time. Kali Linux caught my eye and I downloaded the ISO to try it out for the first time. I played around with VirtualBox, changing random settings like the network configurations, not knowing what they meant at that time. I was fascinated by the tools available in Kali, and quickly started crafting paylods with Metasploit to test on my parents’ devices.
There was once I went to my friend’s house and disabled his laptop’s antivirus so that I could run my payload on it. His mom found out and banned me from using their house’s WiFi. That was quite devastating. (I couldn’t play Brawl Stars without their WiFi 💀)
While my interest in ethical hacking didn’t last for long, I slowly grew fond of Linux through the time I spent using Kali. I grew familiar with the command line and even tried Linux From Scratch. I would spent 12 hours a day in my room compiling Binutils, GCC, etc and reading Detective Conan while waiting for them to finish compiling. I eventually failed at the last chapter due to my own inexperience.
Conclusion
My experiences in primary school shaped my interest in programming, which only continued to grow over the years.
Hope you enjoyed the read!
In the next part, I’ll share how my secondary school years deepened my passion for computing. Stay tuned!