How I got into coding

My first interaction with coding

When I was around 14 years old, I started learning how to code with Python. At first, it was confusing and hard to understand because I was so young and had never done anything like that before. After a few tutorials, I started to understand the basics of programming in Python and wrote small console applications with it.

But then I got very impatient and started to skip the basics, jumping straight ahead to GUI development. This probably was the main reason I quit programming shortly after. The progress of learning how to code was just not going fast enough, and I wanted to code actual applications, not just “console apps”. So I tried to follow my tutorials on programming GUI applications with Python. My understanding of Python was not even enough for the first part of that YouTube tutorial.

I tried to go back to learning the basics, but soon I stumbled on another hurdle and after a while, I decided to quit learning how to code.

Starting to code — again

For the next one to two years, I did not touch coding ever again. I was always a tech-savvy person, so I was also genuinely interested in technology and electronics and pursued this hobby instead.

How Fortnite got me into coding

During 2018 I spent most of my spare time in Fortnite (yes, back then the game was actually enjoyable with a couple of friends) but as I was always tinkering around with the game and ended up modifying its web requests I ended up getting banned.

At first, all I wanted was to get my account and my skins back. But after a while, I just wanted to play the game I loved with my friends again. Unfortunately, I could not as I also received a hardware ban, so I was unable to play Fortnite on my computer anymore. This lead to more tinkering and me spending hours, maybe even days, finding out ways how to bypass their banning system, so I could play again.

Eventually, I found people who sold programs that change some hardware identifiers, resulting in the ban being bypassed. But this lead to another problem, as these programs were rather expensive, and I just could not afford them.

So, I just decided to write my hardware ID spoofer.

As I already had a bit of experience with coding from my time of trying to learn how to code and all that tinkering I did. So, I spent days of my spare time trying to build a program that would unban me from Fortnite's hardware ban. It was a time-consuming, tedious process building such a complex program with my little knowledge of programming, but somehow I made it work — kind of.

During the time of me searching for solutions to bypass my ban, I stumbled across many others who had the same issue. Therefore, I decided to give my little program away to these people, so they could benefit from it as well.

Days after, I got approached by someone offering me to partner with him and selling my program for cheap to get back some of the money I lost because of my account ban in Fortnite. I thought this would be a great idea as I spent tons of money on the game.

So, I coded and coded, learning more and more languages — as I could not get any further with my current knowledge — and learned how to write an authentication system, so users couldn't just give their copy of the program away to others for free.

The time after my Hardware Spoofer

After almost a year I stopped working on my hardware spoofer turning towards other projects as by this time I was not interested in Fortnite anymore, so I had no drive to continue to work on it any longer. Furthermore, the work required to keep the tool functioning was growing exponentially so to me, it was not really worth it anymore. Epic Games changed so many things with their ban system, and it took me so long to figure out how to bypass it every update they released that I just called it a day and quit my project.

Looking back at this time, even though it all started with a depressing phase in my life after the ban, I managed to get to know numerous people and even make some new friends. Of course, I also learned so much about programming and earned a bunch of money — way more than I initially expected — during that timespan, but most importantly it got me into coding full-time.

The year(s) after, I mainly worked on smaller side-projects, earning a bit of money, so I could afford my Netflix subscription and some VPS contracts. I wrote a self-bot for Discord and some small cheats for a couple of games which I then sold for cheap, but I never ended up making a profit with these as the sales were just far too low, and I did not have as much motivation as I had with my spoofer. I ended up mainly using it as an opportunity to strengthen my coding skills and to build a few programs that I would use myself.

After I quit selling stuff

Shortly after, I just quit selling my programs and turned to open-source projects, mainly because I needed some projects I could use to present whilst applying for a job and because it was way more fun as I was not restricted to schedules and updates.

I went through many areas of programming but especially in the last year, I focused on web development as I had the most fun with it. I learned many new frameworks in both front-end and back-end. For me, web development is definitely the future, as I think it has such great potential. I expect, in the future, no one wants to download a program anymore and everyone can just open the browser and use everything from there.

Now I basically only do web development but if I look back, I had tons of fun with desktop development as well.