Can I tell you a secret? I've only started programming frequently at age 25. I've been using a computer DAILY since I was about maybe 10, and gaming on consoles since maybe 4 (I can never really pinpoint what I was doing at what year, and I'm always surprised when others have a clear enough memory to do so). I almost can't believe it took me so long to truely find my passion. I remember seeing my best friend in highscool do some programming and all I saw was a bunch of numbers being thrown around, and shamefully it kinda put me off of the idea. Now I wasn't bad at math mind you, I was actually quite good at it, but I truely felt my future was in the more studious field of biology. For whatever reason biology just clicked with me, but all I really had to do was learn vocabulary and dig deeper in to inner mechanisms of life itself. I only realize now that what I truely liked about biology is getting into the really low level of how systems worked. So when I started signing up for college I didn't really know what I wanted to study, and the counseler suggested I just take the core courses and find out later. I remember seeing the stress in my mothers face after seeing the bill for just one semester, and I didn't have the heart to tell her when I was also assigned to purchase textbooks after my first class (damn you capitalism!!) Needless to say I dropped out quickly after my very first semester. And so I floated around for year afterwards doing odd jobs here and there and the occassional gig work, but mostly just sitting in my room depressed as hell. Eventually I had my so-called "quarter-life crisis" and I knew I had to do something. I've obviuously always like videogames so I said srew it, why not just hop on unity and make a game or something. I was somewhat acquainted with unity at that point, having used it in an elective course in highscool - literally "game development" aswell as afterwards during the big boom of vrchat where I messed around with converting 3d models in blender into usable models within unity for vrchat. But one thing I strongly remember about that elective was having an empty ass game world with a pillbox character model that had absolutly no custom motions or actions me and my team members could implement. We asked the teacher for some scripts or something to help us out but he never got around to it. And so one thing I knew I needed to learn later at 25 was, um, visual scripting? I tried to follow Code Monkey's visual scripting course but all the literal spaghetti code got overwhelming pretty quickly, and I found myself confused at this concept of variables and... idk... whatever else visual scripting calls functions. So I said fuck it, why not just learn actual real programming if this stuff is going to confuse me anyways. I've always been intereted in hacking as a younger lad and would find myself messing around with various "learn python" apps here and there since I've always heard that was the easiest language. And so I decided to follow along with Angela Yu's 100 days of code course. Intially it was really easy, printing hello world in python is about as easy as it gets actually, but for whatever reason I got stuck (for 20 minutes or so) at a quiz question of just having to swap two variables, until it all eventually just clicked, "That's it! Just make another variable"! I have no idea why that was the most complex thing I had to deal with so far but we all have to start somewhere I suppose, infact nowadays I know you don't even need a tmp variable with a little fancy math trick (but it's still safe practice to do so). I found out that programming wasn't really all about just doing math, it was actually about following your logical deduction and creativity. So I was left with a choice, go back to college and be in debt (cringe) or do what I do best and search the internet and find all the answers myself (based) and that's when I found the best free introductionary computer science course yet (maybe ever?), Harvard's CS50x which is "opencourseware" hosted by David Malan and kept online by the CS50 team. At the time of writing I've been programming for over a year or so, I've completed CS50's Python course and am currently trying to figre out what I want to create as my final project for CS50x, so while I figure that out here I will post about various small projects I work on or tutorials I follow.