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

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

#31

Does 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...

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.

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

#32

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…

Hear hear. I got into coding as a young teen from running a counter-strike server and wanting to make my own adminmod plugins to do more cool stuff on the server, had to learn Small C. Then I wanted to go further than the restricted API adminmod had for plugins so I learned how to build and modify actual adminmod, then metamod, eventually was working in C++ building actual mods for half-life, was all fun and games at the time but gave me a platform for a lucrative career later in life, sweet!

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

#33
post #15

A 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…

Good grief. Plenty of people are poor AND don’t have someone to love them.

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

#34
post #15

A 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…

This attitude is not helping your cause at all.

Do you have your health? Are you fit?

Because if you've taken good care of yourself throughout all these years, you can definitely get yourself a great life partner.

If not, then you might have to work on it.

Either way, change your outlook if you want to attract quality. People with options won't want to voluntarily subject themselves to this persona, it's miserable, learn to love yourself.

The combination of good health and fitness, financial stability, no debt, no kids, no divorce, is exponentially increasingly rare and desirable with age. It's a hell of a catch, a damn unicorn.

When I was in my 20s I found fit cougars undesirable as all hell, in my 40s now when I see a fit single woman over 35 without any kids, no divorce, no drama or evidence of crazy, I get very interested. It's the same for women. If you make it into your late 30s and beyond without getting trapped with a bunch of baggage and are in great health, you've dodged multiple bullets! You just have to put yourself out there and meet members of the opposite sex (or same if that's your preference) who are in a similar position and discover your real prime years.

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

#35

It's kinda sad how games don't really work this way anymore. There are few open-world sandbox games and mods aren't really a thing. It's "free-to-play" skinner box treadmills from here on out.

Be the change you want to see.

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights." - Ronnie Coleman

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

#37
wow, this is kinda similar to how I got into coding and reverse engineering. what got me into it was Ultima Online and my first serious effort at learning coding was in C# of all languages. I focused on macroing and I helped pioneer/consolidate hacks across (hundred+?) client versions. I made a macroing client with built in script compilation (C# of course) which included code completion and syntax highlighting back when it was pretty difficult to do. the main difference is I decided to become a drug dealer instead of a professional coder and though I had pretty amazing short term success I'm now considered a violent felon by the state of California.

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

#38
I remember back around the same time in 2008ish, I was reading the old WoW Glider (Glider was a Bot for WoW) forums and came across someone who was running a massive WoW farm from Germany racking in close to 150k a year. It's so interesting to see the transition both games have gone through to embrace the Pay-To-(Somewhat)-Get-Ahead with both WoW offering Tokens ($20 for 150k gold) and RuneScape offering Bonds ($7 for 4 million GP).

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

#39

It's kinda sad how games don't really work this way anymore. There are few open-world sandbox games and mods aren't really a thing. It's "free-to-play" skinner box treadmills from here on out.

reverse engineering is your friend. i've modded all sorts of stuff that never intended it... Full Tilt Poker back in the day, MechWarrior Online, Ultima Online, etc. Learning how to hook into a program's functions and extract real-time data without destroying the stack, properly calling game functions with your own arguments, and translating your patches to new client versions is all pretty interesting and gratifying IMO.

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

#40
Holy shit! This is literally my story too. Playing runescape and writing scripts for botting programs was literally how I learned to program.

I ended up becoming a moderator on the RsBot forums and I remember Autofighter Pro when it came out. Super popular, and I didn't even realize it was made by someone the same age as me back then!

Anyways, even though I didn't make any money (I gave my scripts away for free!), I did learn a lot. I'm currently an engineer at Google and I honestly owe it to the incredible monotony of playing Runescape.

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