If point-and-click game made in PowerPoint, that my grandma actively played because of boredom, is "creative hacky solution", then there you have it.

First game is "The Adventures of Sayid", second "Hide and Seek" with creepy pasta sound and graphic assets from Shrek: Activity Center.
Well, that's my childhood without Internet, what I can say!

There is this work from home job, where they recruited me in one day, want a client project ready by next night. Asked for offer letter many times, but not recieved till now. Too many red flags? Or is it just me?

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

Client: "Do you think we could finish specs in week 33, see a demo in week 35, and aim for the product to be finished in week 39?"

I jump on the conference room table, rip the shirt off my sweaty chest, and yell:

"WEEKS OF WHAT? 31 WEEKS SINCE YOU BECAME A CLIENT, 35 WEEKS FROM NOW, 39 WEEKS INTO THE PREGNANCY? BLOODY FUCKING HELL MAN, DO YOU HAVE TO TALK LIKE A RETARD?"

Client, unfazed: "Weeks since the start of the year, sir"

Me, swinging my pants above my head like a lasso:

"WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF SNOWFLAKE ARE YOU, YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO COUNT THE WEEKS SINCE THE START OF THE YEAR? WHAT ABOUT JUST USING DAY OF THE MONTH YOU OBNOXIOUS DIMWIT?"

Client: "We always use weeks at our company to plan things"

Me, winding the legs of my pants around the neck of the client:

"I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE USE WEEKNUMBERS, JAKE. I. FUCKING. HATE. IT."

Client, still pretending everything is fine: "If you want I could send you a screenshot of my outlook calendar?"

Me, sitting in underpants on the client's back, sweaty legs wrapped around his waist, trying to pull out his gel-infested manager-hair while strangling him with my pants:

"TIME OF DEATH, UNIX TIMESTAMP 1595240810, ISO 8601 DATE 2020-07-20T10:26:50+00:00. ANOTHER PROJECT SUCCESSFULLY WRAPPED UP"

(parts of this story may have been dramatized to reflect my underlying emotions)

Does anyone know how in Movies and TV shows do all those computer sites/software are done?
Like when we see a cia mission room for example, and there after agents running a face recognising and get 50 popups with information, or location some secret hide out place and super cool screen with 10 widgets show us location..
That can't be real.. But i have no idea how it's done.. is it green screen replaced later with fake video, or something similar? Please help, I MUST KNOW THE TRUTH!!!!!!!

Just found a Duck Store in Barcelona!! Wow decisions, desicions.. it's going to be tough😨

I heard you guys like rubber ducks. Here is a Tomato Duck.

My girlfriend knows what a coder needs when it’s their birthday. Lucky to have her. Walked into my room and it was set up like this.

DevDucks. By the plumage you can tell they're arch master race. Seen today while out in the daylight.

So last week, I built my first pc together with my brother. Look at the pretty lights!

When I didn't have to rely on Google or Stackoverflow

Got my first online payment => devrant supporter :D

😆 Raise Your Hands if this is Your Situation 😆

#WorkFromHomeLife

Wow I have walked 21 steps today!

Something I probably shouldn't talk about:

One of the projects at work has a specific path you can visit. The """security""" is that nobody should know the path. But I can guaran-fucking-tee you it's not difficult to guess.

On this page, ***without a login***, you can view some user information. Well, you can view all of it, but only certain fields.

And if you perform a specific action on this page, you can get their password, plaintext.

This project is not mine. But learning all of this made me super uneasy. I had to share it.