I was first introduced to programming by my dad when I was just starting middle school. He had made a career out of it and wanted me to try it in case I found it interesting, which I did.

One of the ways I started learning programing was Project Euler. The website has a list of problems to solve. Unfortunately, I don’t have the files for any of these. It’s been a while since I tried any of these and I never got that many of them solved anyways, so I may go back some time in the future to see how many I can get solved.

Another place I started was by writing programs on Khan Academy’s programming section. My projects are still there, but many most are not particularly interesting. The ones I find interesting are listed here.

Near the end of middle school, I decided to transfer from Khan Academy to standalone programming. I began by learning the HTML canvas since it was the most similar to the Khan Academy environment. I have continued to use JavaScript and webpages to program as my preferred language when given the choice.

Freshman year of highschool, I learned C++ in a computer science class. This was my first experience learning a different language. Not only did I learn C++, but it also helped me better understand JavaScript. By how they were similar, but moreso by how they solved the same issues in different ways.

Both sophomore and junior year of highschool, we transitioned to Java instead of C++. Already knowing both JavaScript and C++ made learning Java far easier than it was for my friends.

Senior year was structured differently. Instead of a normal lecture style class, we had 4 projects throughout the semester. For the first 3 projects we used Java since thats what we had been using before, but for the final project we instead learned Swift. Learning Swift was an interesting experience because its flexibility reminded me of JavaScript. Furthermore, my friends had only learned Java and C++ which were far stricter languages.

Throughout my high school computer science classes, because I was ahead in the content, I got to use that as an opportunity to teach my friends the parts they couldn’t grasp as easily. I believe it was these classes that gave me such a passion for teaching others. Seeing people reach that moment where they can’t help but go “Ohhh… of course” once they finally understand it is incredible.

During high school, I also worked on programming outside of class. I learned Python to experiment with webscraping. While playing Garry’s Mod with some friends, I got so tired of people talking in Discord despite being dead in game, also known as ghosting, that I learned Lua just so I could make an addon for the game that would mute them in Discord if they were dead. Not long after this, I learned that the OpenComputers mod for Minecraft used Lua, so I experimented with some more Lua there.

I am currently learning C# and Unity for both a school project and as a programmer for the VALORANT fan project AMORANT. I am also expecting to use Java, Python, C++, and R during this semester.

To this day, I’ve learned JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Java, Python, C++, C#, Lua, and Swift. Of these, my best are definitely JavaScript, Java, and Python. The rest of the languages, I’d likely have to refer to some documentation for something in the language.