Around eight years ago, I wrote my first bit of code. It was in sixth grade Computer class, where we were taught an introduction to Macromedia Flash. It was a popular thing at that time. Sites like Y8, Newgrounds, and Miniclip held massive collections of user-submitted Flash games and animations that drove tons of traffic their way.
Being an avid visitor of those sites, I couldn’t settle with learning just the rudimentary aspects of Flash. I wanted to learn more than the basics, but more importantly at that time, I wanted to learn how to make my own game.
I spent my leisure time having adventures on Google, typing sloppy searches that proved I didn’t really know what I was looking for. An endless stream of how-tos and tutorials flooded my history and bookmarks, and after days of curiosity-driven exploration, I found myself able to make a circle move across the screen with a press of a key.
Weeks later, I gathered enough experience to accomplish slightly more complicated tasks. I started learning more about programming concepts, which as a kid, I thought were insanely convoluted, like if-then statements and for loops. But this steep climb encouraged me more than it made me want back down. I was motivated by that fact that learning more things made me even more capable of creating whatever I wished. It was as if I had discovered Legos for a second time; I realized that I could build anything that I wanted to, and that my imagination was only limited by my own creativity.
I grew a deep admiration towards programmers and developers the first time I attempted to recreate a simple game. Titles like Snake, Tic-tac-toe, and Mario may seem like straightforward games to code, but I learned that there are more ways to get it wrong than right. It was naive for me to think that simple ideas didn’t require a lot of time and effort.
More often than not, while we can dumb down the gist of an app or a game in a few words, it takes hundreds of times as many lines of code to actually create it. My immersion in programming shone light on the challenges that developers face when turning their abstract ideas into reality.
When my interest deviated from game development to web development, my admiration deepened. I started appreciating programming not just as a hobby, but as a hard-earned skill that people work towards improving.
While a novice programmer would be satisfied with code that runs, there are some who make it a point to write good code. There are countless different ways to write a program that accomplishes a task, but there are only a select few solutions that are elegant, and to an extent, artistic.
Even though code may be invisible to the average person, developers frame their masterpieces on the screens we interact on. The combination of the programmer’s creativity and skill produces well-written code that translates into software, which we take for granted. We have become highly dependent on the apps we use each day that it becomes easy to forget that the digital world we live in today were crafted by people too.
