I started messing around with code when I was about 12. Most of the code was reverse engineered or directly copied from tutorials on various video sites or Invisionfree/ZB forums.

Making little panels in VB that would light up, followed by modifying a C# "auto-clicker" for a popular MMO of the mid 2000s so I could play Guitar Hero while gaining XP were some of those projects. I never really got into developing more seriously until a train ride in 2015.

I was taking computer science courses at the University of Arkansas. It was a lecture of C++ on a whiteboard in a classroom of 120 people. Not exactly the most engaging course but I saw the benefit in it for those who had no previous experience.

However, I joined a gaming group later that year. I was dealing with pretty severe depression at the time and saw an imgur advertisement for Project Patch (now known as Patch Gaming). This was in the very early days of Discord, and so the discord bot community was not as accessible or prolific at the time. Patch had a rapidly growing community and with that, a large need for automated management.

That spring break I was sitting on a train from Kansas City, MO to St. Louis. Amtrak was exclaiming that this particular train had Wi-Fi. I was skeptical, especially since we were going through central Missouri. As it turns out, the train did in fact have Wi-Fi, but the cellular antenna on top of the train providing the actual internet connection allocated around 800kbps/device.

My initial plan was to play Titanfall, but given aforementioned limitations I decided to see what I could do about the automation problem on Patch. I talked with the upper staff and they approved the idea of having a bot that could tag a random staff member with a "Listener" role if someone requested emotional support/advice. So I started to work on learning python on this 7 hour train ride. About 3 hours in, I had a pretty good grasp of its syntax and wrote a local command line to parse discord-ish messages and respond. I then began to research (slowly) the discord.py API, and about this time the internet went completely out.

I luckily had a better connection on my phone, and was somehow able to SSH into my VPS on which I had a couple side projects. I was able to transfer the previous code onto my phone and then to the VPS. I finished the first version of the bot in another 2 hours via nano.

Somehow on that train I had become so interested in the ability of automation to help people, and the somewhat artistic ways you could design applications. Since then I excelled in my software classes due to a newfound interest and still work on the bot today.

I now work for a local Fortune 500 company as a full stack developer, and while I don't use much python for work, I still have the interest that I found on the train.