@rodneyg_, the link to 'cold-emailing Mark Cuban' is broken
How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
11–20 of 227 posts
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#12A nice story of how a young boy's enthusiasm and unhindered spirit got in the right place at the right time. I feel happy for him and his family to stumble upon this path in life - and then smashing it an building his own gold road! Alas, I also feel sad at the same time, for myself not having that opportunity and having wasted my programming skills all together after I went to university,due to outside pressures and…
I'm dull, what do you mean by chasing your own dick?
I suspect it has to do with pursuing the carnal pleasures rather than the computational variety.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#13These stories are entertaining but one must always remember there is some element of luck when things like this happen, and plenty of people coding side projects and not making a dime. So don't feel bad if you didn't make enough money top buy a house while you were are school!
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#14Games with strong user-hosted server ecosystems seem to be a great way for kids to start gaining serious coding experience. I went a similar path with Minecraft servers (and also first started with Runescape, both are in Java) - making a server in highschool and grossing ~$150k in a year and a half.
Before making a server, I thought coding was cool, but had never done much beyond running some basic programs. Making a server gave me clear goals that helped me learn coding much faster. "I need to figure out how to add custom bosses so my server will be more fun!" is much more fun and interesting to a teenager than "I need to figure out how to remove a Car object from this list of Car objects". There's also the very important social aspect - seeing other real people enjoy code you wrote is extremely satisfying.
And you can do really cool stuff with servers that teaches you real things, moreso than any class could. My own experience writing a ton of custom code for my Minecraft server taught me things like Unix, Redis, MySQL, web dev, reading obfuscated code, networking (like running 8 servers and writing code to pass players from one to another), deployment, basic security, pathfinding algorithms, writing scripting engines, etc. etc. all of which I had no experience with before, and would not have learned for several years otherwise. I'm graduating with my master's in CS now and still haven't been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make. The few other devs of big servers that I knew had similar experiences - started off as beginner programmers, and gained a huge amount of experience from building out a passion project.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#15A nice story of how a young boy's enthusiasm and unhindered spirit got in the right place at the right time. I feel happy for him and his family to stumble upon this path in life - and then smashing it an building his own gold road! Alas, I also feel sad at the same time, for myself not having that opportunity and having wasted my programming skills all together after I went to university,due to outside pressures and…
If it’s any comfort the alternative doesn’t turn out much better. Most of my life I looked down on prurient interests and instead chose to master my profession, convinced it had to be the smart choice.
Now I find myself on the wrong side of 30 with a collection of useless money and assets slowly coming to accept that I’ll never have that ideal lifelong relationship with someone that matters. Soon I’ll have more years behind me than there are ahead and anyone I find will never have the shared experience of being with me during my prime years. They can never be a life partner now, they are simply a partner joining me as I age and go downhill from here.
I wish I had spent more time on the hunt when I still had my entire life ahead of me. So if that’s what you did, don’t worry, it works out better in the end.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#16A nice story of how a young boy's enthusiasm and unhindered spirit got in the right place at the right time. I feel happy for him and his family to stumble upon this path in life - and then smashing it an building his own gold road! Alas, I also feel sad at the same time, for myself not having that opportunity and having wasted my programming skills all together after I went to university,due to outside pressures and…
The funny thing is that someone very close to me knew how to program, and never once did they think it would be cool to show me how. I didn't write my first line of code until I was 26 or so. Maybe even later. To be honest, I think that's how you become good - by working on your own stuff. I feel like my skills are rotting at work. I work with "cool tech," but I basically "learn it" for long enough to implement it an…
You become good by spending long amounts of time on your computer, sometimes for 12 hours a day. It is a lonely and solitary activity.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#17"I began to spend much less time gaming, and the majority of my time developing my bot."
That's what happened to me. I started playing games, then modifying them, then writing my own, then the coding consumed all my time.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#18Great story, Rodney! You've done very well for yourself.
My background shares some similar elements of yours during the same time period albeit with a different game, Habbo Hotel, and a lot less money :-).
In a few years we'll start to see more from the Minecraft and redstone generation.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#19A nice story of how a young boy's enthusiasm and unhindered spirit got in the right place at the right time. I feel happy for him and his family to stumble upon this path in life - and then smashing it an building his own gold road! Alas, I also feel sad at the same time, for myself not having that opportunity and having wasted my programming skills all together after I went to university,due to outside pressures and…
If it’s any comfort the alternative doesn’t turn out much better. Most of my life I looked down on prurient interests and instead chose to master my profession, convinced it had to be the smart choice. Now I find myself on the wrong side of 30 with a collection of useless money and assets slowly coming to accept that I’ll never have that ideal lifelong relationship with someone that matters. Soon I’ll have more years…
> If it’s any comfort the alternative doesn’t turn out much better. Most of my life I looked down on prurient interests and instead chose to master my profession, convinced it had to be the smart choice.
> Soon I’ll have more years behind me than there are ahead and anyone I find will never have the shared experience of being with me during my prime years. They can never be a life partner now, they are simply a partner joining me as I age and go downhill from here.
You have it all wrong. Your "prime" is what you make of it. Thinking that someone couldn't be a lifelong partner because they entered your life past your prime will only set you up for unhappiness. I don't know you but I truly hope you do find someone whom you feel you can call a life partner.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#20Does anyone remember The New Yorker article from June 2018 about the magazine “Teen Boss” that described similar stories regularly, except that it was marketed to pre-teens and teens?
The cover of one of their issues is really something to behold: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-very-unnervi...