I frequently get asked how exactly I got to where I am. In my high school it’s not very typical for someone to be this specialized, and people often cannot seem to understand how exactly I can dedicate so much time to something that people get paid to do. Here’s how I started:
When I was 6 years old, I wanted games on my tablet, as any child does. However, my parents did not want to give me these games. I still wanted to play them though, so I thought: “how are games made?”. Through some googling, I somehow came across this website. What really interested me about it was that it had a “playground” feature (looks like it’s called “code bits” now? huh.) I could just look up “game” and play whatever I wanted. My first introduction to programming was here. I would have the code to the left and a window to the right where the HTML ran. However, it took several years before I stopped just collapsing the sidebar with the code and simply playing the game. Eventually, when I got more curious, I started playing around with the code and learned that I could delete or modify the text to make the program look different. There wasn’t too much activity in this time period, but I would visit this site occasionally. By the time I was 10, I created an account on the site and started cloning other people’s projects and making my own changes (in fact, my account is still up!) This was when I actually started learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I think I even dabbled in a little bit of C++ and Java around this time but I don’t really remember the details.
I joined my robotics team in 7th grade, which caused me to get more involved in programming and eventually learn Java, which is used to program the robots. During the start of my time there, I made a scouting app to track teams at competitions, but it failed because I didn’t know the slightest bit of React at the time.
Some time in late 2023, I started working on my first big project. It was a fork of Fegaria Remastered, made in an attempt to replicate Terraria (because my parents wouldn’t let me get the real thing). I spent way too much time on this project. I really wish I knew vim commands back then because the codebase was so large that it took considerable repetitive effort to change things like how blocks and items are stored. I was so dedicated to the project that I eventually bought Terraria just to replicate it here. In hindsight, it was doomed from the beginning because the existing codebase was spagetti and my new codebase wasn’t much better (also 10k lines of Python is nightmare fuel). I worked on this for around 2 years, but eventually lost interest and abandoned it.
In the next robot season, I still didn’t know Java, so I worked on the only part of the robot that wasn’t in Java, which was the LED code in Python (this one was a pretty big achievement for me. Async on MicroPython is a pain.)
In 2024, I started learning Java by creating a 3d rendering engine. It was really basic, but that meant it didn’t use any external libraries, which was nice.
Around the end of 2024, I created a CodeForces account and learned C++, but solely for the purpose of competitive programming. For some super weird reason, I only did 800 rated problems (I solved over 100). This was a terrible way to practice and didn’t help me improve as a competitive programmer at all.
The first open-source project I seriously contributed to was Baritone. This singlehandedly 100xed my Java knowledge. It was an amazing learning experience. However, as a result of the owner being very inactive, I eventually abandoned most of my pull requests, despite having worked on some for many months (see #4787 and #4838).
Using this knowledge of Java, I made contributions to that year’s robot code and LED code. After the robot season was over, I started learning C by converting a Java 3d rendering engine to C (you can C it here haha).
In late 2025, I began learning Rust. I wouldn’t get deep into it until the summer of 2026, but I made a simple library for getting key events. This was also around the time I started dipping my toes into AI.
In the 2026 robot season, I programmed all of the robot code myself. I would estimate that I did ~10k lines of code in those 3 months. Lots of late nights went into that one. Almost no AI was used, which looking back, probably wasn’t the best decision. It would have been much easier if I had used AI. The season was very overwhelming when I was solo.
Also around this time, I began on a successor to my C rendering engine called dcat. Currently I’m in the process of rewriting it to Rust. I also devoted more time to my Desmos programming language Somsed, but that’s currently private to give me that competitive edge in the Desmos Art Contest.
In the summer, I started doing competitive programming more often (but not as often as I should have) and worked on maturing the projects I started.
Currently, I’m just coding in any spare time I have, but coding isn’t the only thing I do now. I’m taking hard classes so I have less time, but coding still finds its way into almost all of my days. Anyway, that just about wraps up my (coding) life. It’ll probably progress more, but this is what’s happened so far. Cya!