5 Years of Programming at Just 14

Hi, I’m bluuxn and I’m 14 now, I have started my programming when I was 9 when covid 19 reach its peak. and now I want to share my little experience and my thought about programming at a very young age.

first let’s start with why and how I get to programming, when I was 9 the covid pandemic starts to spread rapidly and we’re warned to stay at home, as of other ordinary kids I’m started to get bored of my activity at home until I found Unity, I’m very excited to make my own games cause I’m also a gamer and ended up making some simple games with Unity and my first ever programming language which is C#.

but my journey with Unity didn’t go smoothly, my potato laptop with 4gigs of ram and could only handle handle Minecraft with lowest possible option and run on 15 fps couldn’t handle Unity anymore. I started to consider my choice of using an engine after I found out game framework like SFML.

at around 10-12 years old I’ve decided to picking up game frameworks and ditch game engine. at first it was a pain in the ass trying to figure out how to link those game framework also learning a new language which i choose C++, I’m not that type of person that are very consistent at that point considering my age too, also at that point I learn various programming languages like C, Java, Javascritp, Typescript, Rust, Nim, V, Zig while also learning some web development things.

13 is when I started to feel that I’ve growing a lot, understand many programming concepts. At late 13 I found Odin programming language which I really like cause it get things going very easy as there are so many libraries especially game dev related things that are built in inside Odin, I also try to finally understand graphics programming and OpenGL as I’ve already know it when I was 11 using LWJGL but couldn’t figure out how it works, but when I almost reach 14 at February, I’m trying to give graphics programming and OpenGL a second shot, and I ended up very liking it and make some 2d renderer. I also give Zig a second shot too as I don’t like it when I first found it, the retrial of Zig also start out when I know more of Data Oriented Programming and started to dislike Object Oriented Programming as it force me to always thinks of an object that makes my journey very slow.

now I’m 14 and my old laptop is broken, I will alwas remember that laptop that force me to get into low level programming and terminal (I use NeoVim btw), but my family can’t afford a new laptop as our financial isn’t that good even repairing it we don’t have that money considering our daily needs and school needs.

now I make a 3D horror game with some of my friends using my phone and Godot Engine, yes, I ended up using a game engine but the reason I use game engine again is because I can’t figure other way and thankfully Godot have official Android port, I’ll post some videos about my game progress on my YouTube channel “bluuxn”.

That was my programming journey, actually there are many things that i didn’t mention as I already tired typing with my phone. Thanks if you read all the way to this, I really appreciate your effort. :)