Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 227 posts

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#21

Post by robohydrate »

celdon25 wrote: post #4

I had a similar idea for Asheron's Call, to build a modular plugin system for its bots. People could in theory be authorized to receive a plugin, which would be beamed from the server and dynamically injected at runtime. Reasonably secure copy-protection (aside from the rare determined and skilled hacker). I even had about 10k lines of code written, but it wasn't very impressive (although there were some interesting…

I got my start programming because I was interested in writing plugins for the Decal framework.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#22

Post by PostOnce »

rococode wrote: post #14

Games 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…

It's sad how few games let you host your own now. Pay for XBL/PSN/whatever, or the PC game co runs all the servers, or Google wants to sell you Stadia.

Fortunately, "moddable" is a genre and people want it, so it can't be killed completely. Kind of like how adding IAP "makes more money", but "doesn't have IAP" is a genre people want, too.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#23

Post by yangikan »

vzhou842 wrote: post #5

I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people who also do. [1] https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/

I was planning to introduce my kids to game development this summer. Is Gamemaker still the best platform to introduce kids to game dev? My kids know a bit of scratch...

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#24

Post by WalterBright »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #13

These 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!

You've got to give luck an opportunity to find you, by getting involved in things.

Once the author saw the opportunity, he then pivoted to exploit it through a lot of time and effort. It's pretty clear that other bot makers did not see that opportunity, or saw it and did little.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#25

Post by lucidone »

vzhou842 wrote: post #5

I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people who also do. [1] https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/

I was heavily involved in the private server scene in the late 2000s :-)

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#26

Post by seibelj »

vzhou842 wrote: post #5

I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people who also do. [1] https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/

I got into programming because of Runescape as well! Although my beginning was bots written in AutoHotKey that would:

1) Search screen for pixels within the color of bones

2) Pick up bones

3) Bury bones

My prayer level went through the roof! Then they implemented "sleep", a system where each action added a bit of "exhaustion" that could only be solved by walking to a bed, sleeping, and typing in a captcha in order to wake up. Killed my bots! But not my love of programming :-)

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#27

Post by jeremysalwen »

Wow, exactly how I got into programming too! although I made 40$ in the end instead of 200k :D The timing also matches up pretty well, I wonder if we bumped into each other on the forums. I was on the scar forums, then SRL, but the period I was most active was on villavu (iRobot), after Arga came out I started to become less active. I wasn't at all involved with the RSbot scene and knew almost nothing about it.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#28

Post by sthielen »

vzhou842 wrote: post #5

I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people who also do. [1] https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/

You can count me as another data point. I started taking coding seriously at around 11/12 years old, working on one of the big Runescape fansites, and very quickly lost interest in playing the game because I found coding to be more fun.

I wonder where this is happening today, for the next generation of developers. Roblox seems like a big one, are there others?

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#29

Post by connor4312 »

rococode wrote: post #14

Games 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…

A similar story here. I was into the game and started running a Minecraft server hosting company in high school (selling VPS'es with a Minecraft control panel, effectively). I ended up learning and doing the operations, maintenance, support, marketing, taxes--the usual jack-of-all trades of being a startup. My connections and experience there led directly to me joining another company, which has subsequently been acquired and landed me at Microsoft.

I wish more CS/programming classes, particularly pre-college, were game-oriented. A Java course I took in school had us writing a 'database' command line app that held fake enrollment information. Had that kind of thing been the only exposure to programming that I was given, I almost certainly would not have entered the field. But show someone like me a way to automate or expand something like Runescape or Minecraft? That, I'm interested in.

Post reply on HN