I am a man of many talents, but this site is about my adventure in coding, so let‘s focus on this part for now :)
The latest period of my story started at the very beginning of 2018, when I felt yet again an urge to start coding. After years of working on my personal development and trying to find THE thing in my life, I returned to some serious coding again. I started to learn Java and development for Android. I found out that my love for coding has not subsided in the recent past, but that it grew even stronger. Metaphorically speaking, I was hungry. All the possibilities have opened with my discovery of Udemy e-learning platform – this has ultimately given me the drive to bring my coding from amateur to professional level.
It is still my dream to be a game developer, but during the course of my life, I found out that I don’t really care what is it that I am developing, as long as it’s coding, thinking, solving challenges, and learning to write better, more elegant and effective code. Even in the routine coding, there is always a way to do it nicer, or just faster. I want to know, to find out about things. I cannot withstand not being able to do something when I think (or know) that I should be able to do it. I cannot tolerate it in myself to create an app with flaws or with user-unfriendly UI. In a nutshell, coding is my ultimate game – the most complex one, the one unforgiving of laziness, slopiness or being stupid. A game which is extremely rewarding. It’s the most delicious food for my soul.
However, my path started a long time ago. Even when I was still a child, around 9 years old, I used to browse magazines and look for code samples in them. These were the only things that I could get my hands on, because it was still deep in the communist era and there were limited resources. I had no idea what it does or what is it good for, but I was simply fascinated by the sheer shape and form of code. What is more, I used to simply type this code into the editor on my 8bit Atari, just for the heck of "writing code".
Let’s move on to High school – there I had an opportunity to finally do some real basic coding in…well, Basic. At this time, I had several years of playing computer games behind me and my gaming period left a strong wish in me to create new Dungeon Master, new Eye of the Beholder, or new Black Crypt. I had no clue whatsoever where to start. So I was just trying to make text adventure in Basic. It was fun to use batch files as parts of the code with data and "rooms". From today’s point of view it was an entertaining way to "emulate" OOP, even though I had no idea at the time that OOP exists and what does it even mean.
Fast forward into the future – I am 22 and my hunger for coding strikes again. I started to learn C++ (as it was the most popular language at that time). Slowly, I got deeper and deeper into it, and during several subsequent years, I programmed some projects worth mentioning. Bear in mind that coding was my hobby, I felt no rush to become a coding master. I just wanted to be able to create what I wanted to create, and to make programs to help me in my work, and generally to have a lot of fun. Yes, I am the kind of weirdo who enjoys immensely to not be able to go to sleep because the next compile must finally work… And the kind who spends days or even months thinking one problem over and over.
In those days I used mainly books as a source of knowledge, and my library started to flourish. This brings me back to the present moment where this article began. I still have the books, but I have become really good at finding solutions using the knowledge base of the internet.
I don’t know what lies beyond, but I am ready to explore it.