<story><title>How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)</title><url>https://medium.com/tech-product-and-life/how-i-made-200-000-when-i-was-16-years-old-304f0e87cfb6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rococode</author><text>Games with strong user-hosted server ecosystems seem to be a great way for kids to start gaining serious coding experience. I went a similar path with Minecraft servers (and also first started with Runescape, both are in Java) - making a server in highschool and grossing ~$150k in a year and a half.&lt;p&gt;Before making a server, I thought coding was cool, but had never done much beyond running some basic programs. Making a server gave me clear goals that helped me learn coding much faster. &amp;quot;I need to figure out how to add custom bosses so my server will be more fun!&amp;quot; is &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more fun and interesting to a teenager than &amp;quot;I need to figure out how to remove a Car object from this list of Car objects&amp;quot;. There&amp;#x27;s also the very important social aspect - seeing other real people enjoy code you wrote is extremely satisfying.&lt;p&gt;And you can do really cool stuff with servers that teaches you real things, moreso than any class could. My own experience writing a ton of custom code for my Minecraft server taught me things like Unix, Redis, MySQL, web dev, reading obfuscated code, networking (like running 8 servers and writing code to pass players from one to another), deployment, basic security, pathfinding algorithms, writing scripting engines, etc. etc. all of which I had no experience with before, and would not have learned for several years otherwise. I&amp;#x27;m graduating with my master&amp;#x27;s in CS now and still haven&amp;#x27;t been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make. The few other devs of big servers that I knew had similar experiences - started off as beginner programmers, and gained a huge amount of experience from building out a passion project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wayfarer2s</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m graduating with my master&amp;#x27;s in CS now and still haven&amp;#x27;t been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make.&lt;p&gt;Maybe the fact that you figured it out is an indication that it doesn&amp;#x27;t have to be taught in a CS curriculum. Most of the things that you mentioned have great documentation and tutorials outside of the classroom. The fact that so many people use them without them being taught in schools should be proof enough. I think the current situation makes sense -- Computer Science education should focus on teaching the fundamentals of algorithms, data structures, discrete math and how to think conceptually about problems without regard to implementation. By learning about data structures and the like, you indirectly learn how best to use memory, redis, MySQL, write servers and whatever else.</text></comment>
<story><title>How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)</title><url>https://medium.com/tech-product-and-life/how-i-made-200-000-when-i-was-16-years-old-304f0e87cfb6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rococode</author><text>Games with strong user-hosted server ecosystems seem to be a great way for kids to start gaining serious coding experience. I went a similar path with Minecraft servers (and also first started with Runescape, both are in Java) - making a server in highschool and grossing ~$150k in a year and a half.&lt;p&gt;Before making a server, I thought coding was cool, but had never done much beyond running some basic programs. Making a server gave me clear goals that helped me learn coding much faster. &amp;quot;I need to figure out how to add custom bosses so my server will be more fun!&amp;quot; is &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more fun and interesting to a teenager than &amp;quot;I need to figure out how to remove a Car object from this list of Car objects&amp;quot;. There&amp;#x27;s also the very important social aspect - seeing other real people enjoy code you wrote is extremely satisfying.&lt;p&gt;And you can do really cool stuff with servers that teaches you real things, moreso than any class could. My own experience writing a ton of custom code for my Minecraft server taught me things like Unix, Redis, MySQL, web dev, reading obfuscated code, networking (like running 8 servers and writing code to pass players from one to another), deployment, basic security, pathfinding algorithms, writing scripting engines, etc. etc. all of which I had no experience with before, and would not have learned for several years otherwise. I&amp;#x27;m graduating with my master&amp;#x27;s in CS now and still haven&amp;#x27;t been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make. The few other devs of big servers that I knew had similar experiences - started off as beginner programmers, and gained a huge amount of experience from building out a passion project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phito</author><text>I learned programming at 13 for similars reasons. First I got an action replay for my Gameboy Adavance, and this opened a whole way of thinking about videos games to me: I could override the restrictions of the game and do the impossible things I always fantasized about (for example walking into the grass in the Pokemon day care). Althrough I had no idea of how it worked at the time, it really sparked something into me.&lt;p&gt;Soon after, I got into a French MMORPG called Dofus and I absolutely loved it (maybe even a bit too much?). But since this was an online game, there was no cheat codes for it. After days of searching on the internet, I joined a few small communities of other kids that were learning programming in order to write bots for that game.&lt;p&gt;It was so much fun, and got me to learn about so many aspects of programming: reverse engineering, network communication, &amp;quot;AI&amp;quot;, pathfinding, complex user interfaces, RSA authentication, security (the game had a lot of anti-bot technology), making a lexer&amp;#x2F;parser in order to have my own scripting system for users and so much more. It was messy and I kept rewriting all my code as I learned better ways to do things, but it was so rewarding having hundreds of users and a community around it.&lt;p&gt;I am now a professional programmer thanks to this, even through what I was doing wasn&amp;#x27;t particularly ethical or fair towards other players and the devs of the game. But I was too young and was having too much fun to understand that. I stopped once a friend got sued by the game company for making and hosting a server emulator.</text></comment>