Table of contents
How I Became a Programmer
I've never written an article before and want to use this opportunity to introduce myself to anyone who wants to know more about me.
My name is Kody, I have been coding in some form or another for about 5 or 6 years, since the end of eighth grade. I remember it quite clearly; I had no interest in programming and knew absolutely nothing about it. Through someone I had started talking to on a Minecraft server, I learned about something called web development.
Making a website had seemed like something you needed to go college for, and figuring out that all you needed to do was learn something called HTML was a breakthrough and really piqued my interest. So, I got recommended a website called W3Schools and their tutorials on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were so easy to understand that I started making my own crappy little webpages in no time.
In my life I had never had any drive or desire to be something for the future, but this is when I found my true passion. I knew I wanted to be a programmer, go to school, and study Computer Science. Between the summer of middle school and high school I dived into courses on udemy.com and learned how to use node.js and ExpressJS to make dynamic websites, my brain was exploding at the thought of being able to display content onto a page dynamically depending on the URL route. At my high school, we all had Chromebooks, but there was a super restrictive website firewall that prevented you from doing what all of us wanted to do -- play games in class. With the things I had learned, I created my biggest and most complete project yet. It was called "onlinereading.org", and on it you can play tons of different Adobe Flash Games downloaded from sites like kongregate.com which was blocked. The funny reason it was called online reading was because the firewall worked by searching through the HTML content of websites that students visited, and if it found words such as "games", it would then block it from being accessed. So I had the bright idea of naming the entire website with things related to reading books, using no unsafe keywords so that even if you sat on your computer playing games -- no one would know.
My YouTube Channel
Suffice to say, that made me a very popular person because I provided the game hookup. In my junior year, I decided my gaming YouTube channel was not working and transitioned to making programming tutorials on web development. Right off the bat, I had noticed that not only was I get more views on my videos -- it was extremely fulfilling and it allowed me to solidify the things in my mind that I was trying to learn.
One day, I bought Java: The Complete Reference, Tenth Edition. I always wanted to learn Java because of Minecraft. What I did is as I started reading each chapter in the book, I recorded tutorials on the things I had just learned. I go back to those old videos in my Java series to this day and suprisingly they are actually good content quality in my opinion -- even though I was teaching things I had learned just hours before. I definitely want to keep going back and refreshing some of those old videos because an experienced Java developer can obviously teach more.
From there, things have taken off. At the time of writing, my channel is just about to breach 18,000 subscribers and I have many different tutorial series on different topics. It is my greatest passion and addiction; I love being able to teach people and I use my videos to solidify things in my head. It is said that one of the best ways to learn something is to explain it to someone else, and I can confirm that it is true. I seem to be mastering the skill of consuming different source of information on a subject, and explaining it in a way that other people enjoy.
Hopes for the Future
I will be graduating college soon, and gaining more and more experience along the way. I want to take my viewers and readers along for the ride and create an army of programmers thirsty to learn.
Thank you for reading, if you are interested in the work I have done so far, check out youtube.com/KodySimpson