Developing Developments
I realised recently that my development career started when I was 10.
I’ve always loved video games. Who hasn’t? It isn’t a ground breaking statement to say I’ve been playing and enjoying them since I was 7 (coming up on 30 years now). I realised recently though that I actually had the itch to make games around the age of 10.
The first console we had in the house was a NES of course. My parents had owned an Intellivision at some point but that was before me. I also had a Commodore 64 from quite a young age, and it was mine and mine alone. This is where it began.
Unlike a console with just cartridges, this thing also had a tape-deck as a rather dull looking beige peripheral, and so straight away I had to learn how to load my games with text commands. Hours spent playing Treasure Island Dizzy and various demo cassettes from Commodore Format magazine was all well and good, but I also decided I would like to create something.
I don’t know where I got it, and I can only vaguely remember it, but at some point I had a book on coding BASIC on the C64. ‘Goto’ and ‘Read’ and ‘Print’; it actually made sense to me. Through pure self-taught basic BASIC, I managed to cobble together a simple, two-question, multiple-choice quiz, and it worked.
I don’t know what happened, perhaps I thought I would never be able to make anything better than that, but I didn’t go much further than that.
Down the years I have dipped in and out of development; sometimes a bit of HTML or PHP, or self-taught C++ with a textbook, but that first successful application felt incredible. I think I must have caught the bug then even though I didn’t realise it.
So here we are, years later, and I am knee deep in tutorials and courses and YouTube videos, elated at having access to the incredible power of Unity and C# but frustrated that I still don’t have the confidence to sit with a blank project and do it myself. Don’t get me wrong, all of these learning aids are fantastic, but I won’t ever reach my goal of becoming an actual developer, if I can’t do it for myself.
Well that’s about to change.
From here on out I will be sharing what I know and what I have learned so that I can prove to myself that I am a software developer and to show myself how much information I have retained and what skills I do have.
And if it helps others, that’s a nice bonus.
Oh and I still remember the first question from that game all those years ago:
How many engines does a Boeing 747 have?
a) 1
b) 2
c) 3
d) 4
