A Programmer Origin Story
Its middle school, approaching the turn of the century, and the landscape of after school television is changing for me in my New Jersey suburb. It used to be that when I got home, if I wasn’t playing video games, I’d be watching a lineup of Power Rangers, Rocko’s Modern Life, and Marvel/DC cartoons. These shows fell out of my rotation as Pokemon and Cartoon Network’s after school lineup called “Toonami” became more popular. The other good shows in this lineup were Reboot, Gundam Wing, and Sailor Moon. But the one anime that took off in my middle school was Dragon Ball Z. This is only cartoon/show I can remember that any of my groups of friends at school would talk about the next day like WWF or sports.
As someone who mentally enters the universes that these shows create, DBZ took up a good portion of my imagination even outside of watching the show. I’d draw characters, watch Anime Music Videos (thanks to rise of peer-2-peer software), and purchase action figures. What I really wanted to do, though, was play a Dragon Ball Z game. There weren’t any popular ones in the US, so what I started with was text-based roleplaying in the mean streets known as Yahoo chatrooms. This consisted of learning how to read the rooms and just start participating. One of the interesting things I learned about was T1 vs T2 roleplaying, with the former making use of chat tools like dice to keep “fights” fair and the latter being more free-flowing. It was pretty similar to what professional wrestlers do.
Afterwards, I took my first step into the development space when I found out about website based RPGs. With sites like lycos, it was pretty popular to use the templates they had, but I made more use of the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) features. I created all these cool things like different planet pages, character profiles, and was even able to embed a live chatroom for player interactions. It still wasn’t quite what I was looking for, though, because I was looking to create a responsive, visual environment, not just another text-based system.
Enter BYOND (byond.com). My friend introduced me to this Dragon Ball Z based game on BYOND. It was perfect. It was multiplayer, allowed you to create your character as you wanted (or at least as much as you can with pixel art), incorporated a training system, and had a guild system. Even once I got into high school, I would spend a lot of time on this game with my friends (a couple which I met in the game). Then one day the game server went down and it wasn’t available for anyone to play anymore. So that was the end of that.
Then my friend, once again, came through in the clutch. He found the actual source code and assets for this game, and it was in a runnable state. And then I just started tinkering. Whoever coded the game did a good job, because the variable, file, and function names used made enough sense for me to navigate through the code and know when in the actual game a piece of code was being executed. I had all these cool ideas on how I wanted the game to function, such as more urban clothing like my cool friends/rappers wore (white tees and baggy pants), cooler hair styles (cornrows and dreadlocks), and pvp/guildvguild minigames (capture the flag). So I’d spend hours programming and doing pixel art, much like I would playing video games, where the sun would go down and I was so focused that I didn’t notice I was sitting in a pitch black house.
This was also my first introduction to a server, though I didn’t grasp the concept fully at the time. I would use my personal game as the server, and do my best to make sure it was always on, even if I was at school, so others could play even if I wasn’t there. Player files were stored locally, and I remember this, because we had a bug where a person would drop their items, logout without saving, and log back in and the items would be duplicated. I think at peak, we may have had 10–15 players on at the same time.
I was able to learn about while loops. I unfortunately created some scenarios that caused infinite loops. And with no concept of an infinite loop and background/async methods, I just thought the game froze. Another topic was their “goto” keyword. It was this statement that if this scenario is true, immediately jump to a named line of code and continue executing from there. I also learned early to use the equivalent of “print” statements to help me debug. I just think back to how much I didn’t know at that time, and how I was just able to recognize certain patterns in the code and just repeat those parts for what I wanted to do. I wish I still had the code somewhere, because it would be fun to do a code review with my years of professional programming experience.
By the time Junior and Senior year came around, I knew whatever I majored in would have to involve computers. While in hindsight it was a very good choice, at the time, it seemed like my only choice, because there was nothing else I would have been interested enough in to pay attention. I didn’t know any professional programmers, and the only academic usage for computers I had experienced were typing classes (“a a a SPACE a a a SPACE…”) or the CAD program for woodshop. So I didn’t really know much about what a career in programming looked like when I started applying to college.
We won’t talk too much about college, because it wasn’t my greatest work, lol. I went from salutatorian in high school, to studying as hard as I could to get Cs in Calculus and Chemistry (I also suspect I’m dyslexic. I’m like 90% sure I am, so all this makes sense). And that’s pretty much how college courses went. Except for programming classes. Every topic and lab was interesting and perfectly fit into a mental model I already had of programming. The more electrical engineering courses were also super interesting, but I just didn’t have good base model in my head to make it easier to learn.
In closing, I probably could have spent those 12 hour coding sessions in high school on my school work, but the concept of building something and seeing it work was more rewarding. It also further motivated me when my friends and others were able to join the game and have a good time. So counterintuitively, anime and gaming, which can be considered in conflict with school work, lead me to becoming a Software Engineer and having a career in Tech.
