About

Early in my life, I discovered block programming and developed a great interest in it and created many interesting programs ranging from calculators to games. As a result, I became very interested in mathematics because of its utility in my early programs. A while later, I was gifted a desktop, allowing me to access a broader range of tools and other applications available on the internet. I was then able to further extend my skills beyond what would have been possible with just a tablet. Slowly but surely, I shifted away from block programming and towards more modern, textual languages.

A few years later, I learned Python and was able to create simple games without assistance, most notably Tic-Tac-Toe. A lot of the code I had written wasn't necessarily ideal, but it functioned and was usable. Over time, my Python skills were refined as I continually created simple projects to interact with the web and automate the calculation of large amounts of data. Although I knew how to use Python, I still primarily used Scratch for most games. I aspired to create web applications but I didn't know JavaScript at the time, so I used a third-party service to substitute JavaScript for Python. The service provider's logo was always in the corner of every site I made to my dismay, so I turned my attention to JavaScript.

A year after learning Python, I decided to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. At the start, I created sites that exclusively used HTML and CSS to build a strong foundation about page layouts and styles. As time passed, I started integrating JavaScript into my workflow, so scripts originally started out being a few dozen lines to create simple applications. Along with the continuously-improving JavaScript code, my HTML and CSS skills became strengthed along with it. The excess free time I had allowed me to learn quickly. Even while I was busy understanding front-end, I still couldn't get enough of Scratch.

Even until two years after learning Python, I still used Scratch quite frequently because it remained my most comfortable programming style. It was quick to create a program, as it required a mouse drag for each unit of code. However, because Scratch is intended for children, many higher-level features in modern programming languages aren't present in Scratch, such as functions and more complex data structures. Because of the limitations, I learned how to work around them. It forced me to manually program even for simple tasks, but the challenges it presented taught me how to approach and solve a wide variety of problems. Over time, many impressive projects were created that used many different concepts such as recursion, mathematics, and multithreading. Inevitably, I realized that JavaScript offered countless benefits over Scratch, so I stopped using Scratch, and from then on, focused all my effort into JavaScript improvement.

During a nice vacation, I had asked my parents for a Raspberry Pi 5. They purchased the computer and it arrived about a month later. From then on, my scripts would be able to run 24/7 with a large amount of storage for potential databases. Soon after I gained a basic understanding of Linux, I developed a Discord bot for my highschool friend group. Unfortunately, because I struggled to understand how to use port forwarding, I was unable to directly connect my Raspberry Pi to the World Wide Web as a server. This lack of knowlege prevented me from improving my backend development, so I decided to leave the Raspberry Pi alone idling with the bot.

I returned back to development, but mostly focusing on front-end JavaScript. Many niche hobbies helped to expand my knowledge in areas such as image processing and Unicode. My CSS and HTML skills had to match my JavaScript improvement rate. The layouts and styles of my pages were becoming increasingly modernized. Deeper concerns such as accessibility and compatibility arose, both of which I never really considered when starting to develop. Modularity and portability became an issue with huge codebases, so I addressed these issues by learning more industry practices and design patterns.

On 27 October 2024, I purchased a domain and finally figured out how to configure port forwarding. Simple backend hosting code in JavaScript was written for the Raspberry Pi. I integrated other online services such as a CloudFlare reverse proxy. I primarily used the domain to host private repositories. For the most part, I still used GitHub Pages for most web hosting due to its ease of use.

Because I was able to host my projects to the broader internet and had better frontend skills, I decided to pursue full-stack projects. One of which was a relatively complex program that used serverside rendering to serve a web page. It also handled databases that prevented a network from submitting more than once and displayed information regarding the submissions of others. In another project, I created a wrapper for an LLM, which taught me more about internal LLM processing and HTTP Streams. (In progress)

I decided to take AP Computer Science as a relatively easy course and to cover any basic concepts I had missed during my self-teaching. I learned the basics of Java but it turns out that the class is way too easy.