I've been using computers since I was 3. I was tech savvy since I was a child and I have a lot of knowledge about technology and computers. People used to consult me, a 10-year-old, for advice about their tech or technical problems and I was able to fix almost all of them most of the time.
Computers are pretty much everything for me and played a huge role in my life. I was mostly leaning toward fixing stuff, experimenting with stuff with computers but that was pretty much it. I could only fix things, and help and advise people but out of that I had no knowledge about programming and building stuff.
I was taught HTML, Visual Basic and C++ in middle school but I didn't have the programmer mindset back then and had weak math basics so I couldn't do well in programming classes in middle school.
I wasn't taught any CS-related stuff in my 9th and 10th grades because my school wanted to focus completely on exams so I lost touch with programming again.
One day, I found a nice and easy tutorial to make a "chat bot". I think it was in visual basic if I recall it correctly. It wasn't actually a chatbot. It was just a text input that sends prints some output but it was in a GUI form. Doing it felt exciting and it was satisfying.
One day, I heard about Java and wanted to give it a try. I immediately followed a tutorial and tried to print hello world in Java but that program never worked for some reason. I eventually lost interest and dropped the plan to study Java and I kind of developed some hate towards it.
After that incident, I totally lost my confidence about programming and thought that I won't be able to be a good programmer at all and gave up on programming.
Then my final 10th grade exams were approaching so I became busy with the preparation and forgot about programming for a year.
Then my 10th grade was over and I joined in 11th grade.
I took Computer Science as my optional subject since that was the only interesting optional subject in my school.
Then we had online classes since it was during peak pandemic. They were teaching basic stuff like logic gates, boolean algebra at first but after a month of online classes, most of us were tired and didn't listen to it properly.
Then they started python. It felt very easy. It wasn't even remotely verbose and it was quite interesting. We were taught until functions but I didn't have good grip over for loops because of online classes. Since Python was easy, it instilled some confidence in me and I thought of doing some projects with it.
I was using Discord a lot back then and I've seen a lot of cool Discord bots so I wanted to make one on my own. So I used Discord.py library to build a basic version of a discord bot that mimics my chemistry teacher. It was fun but I wanted to try something better.
So I decided to make a discord bot with my friend that sends download links of games on command and share it with other people. I promoted my bot in some gaming communities and it became quite popular. It was used in over 53 discord servers.
Unfortunately, I had some issues with the hosting and I was quite busy with exams again so I had to sunset my bot.
This was a good developer experience and gave me some confidence that I can handle programming.
What gave me more confidence was my final high school project, the electricity billing system. Me and my friend made it in 3 days using Python and SQLite but the teacher wanted myself so we had to redevelop the whole thing in just a few hours. This gave both me and my friend that we're capable of doing programming.
Ever since then, I started making projects. I've made some 38 projects until now. I also learned 6 programming languages during my gap year.
If it wasn't Python, then I would've always thought that I was unfit for programming.