Originally Posted by MoonWitch
Though my skills are no way near Phanx'. She's plain good at it. But just like you, we started somewhere.  |
I started by deciding I wanted to make interactive stories (Choose Your Own Adventure style) in HTML (complete with MS Paint illustrations... and let's just say art is NOT my strong suit) when I was about 9 or 10 years old. I spent hours every day before and after school (and during lunch) in the computer lab, looking at the source code for web pages and figuring out how it worked. Around this time I also changed my mind from wanting to be a veterinarian when I grew up, to wanting to be a web designer. I did pay my bills with freelance web design for a while in the early '00s, but once the web started moving more and more towards JavaScript-ifying everything, I noped right out of there:
I started writing addons when the author of AnkhCooldownTimer stopped maintaining it, using the same method -- look at the code and figure out how it works. When I look back at code I wrote during TBC, it's pretty horrifying. I'm sure if I'm still programming in Lua 5 or 10 years from now, I'll look back at what I'm writing now and cringe. So, yeah, we all start somewhere, and we are generally not very good when we start. You only get good by practicing and pushing yourself to do better.