From zero to the top, how I became a programmer.

Programming is essential these days but do everybody know how to be a programmer ?

Published in

The Doublepicebs Blog

4 min readJul 20, 2019

Once upon a time, a 9 year old kid wanted to create apps and games, but he didn’t have either the resources or the knowledge. It’s my story, see how I became a small programmer without enough personal resources but with desire and will.

Phase 1 — Starting with small stuff

“ Nothing could stop my will” that’s what I did say when I first wanted to make apps and games, when I was a kid. I head to my dad’s iPad, opened app store and clicked search to “level maker games”. There were a plenty of cool games but none did satisfy me enough.

Phase 2 — Diving into development.

When I became 11, I had my first Android phone. I searched about code, programming and more, but these stuff looked hard for me (and that was a big mistake to see things hard) so I just decided to stick with easy things. When I became 12, our school taught us a bit about scratch, a programme that gives youngsters the chance to code from thier own PC. I used my father’s and the school’s computers and then, I feeld that my dream was coming true.

Scratch

Phase 3 — From the zero of Android

Actually scratch didn’t give you the freedom to install or download your projects as standalone apps, and my love to scratch made me search for “Scratch for Android”, on Google play store. I wanted to be able to make games on the go, and use my phone. Then, I came across Sketchware, an ide that makes installable Android apps right on and from your phone, using scratch code blocks.

That seemed cool, and as a zero on Android, my designs were ugly, and then I read UI/UX articles, took free lessons, reviewing and staring at sites and apps. After a year, I became a good designer.

But is that the end ?

Phase 4 — Starting with code

At the 2nd prep. (8th class), my school taught us about HTML, just HTML. Actually, the lessons were small compared to my will to code, and the small pages we created had no css (the code to design a website) or js (the code to make a design fully interactive).

Phase 5 — Apps

That year I had some reasons that made me far from real coding, personal reasons. But I never quit Sketchware and I then created over 30 testing/failed apps, and 2 successful ones, but could I give up ? Never ! I continued making apps in Sketchware. The next year came and our school taught us a bit about VB.NET ( A programming language to create apps “basically windows” )

Visual studio logo

I really had loved Android more than PC and thus I didn’t care about VB a lot, I started looking at Java.

Phase 6 — Teaching myself

Then, I started looking for courses, solo learn, mimo, programming hub, septik and more. After a long search I decided to learn Python, a very readable and powerful programming language. I loved Python and finished mimo’s and solo learn’s courses of Python, I started looking for other languages, I learned a bit of Kotlin, dived into HTML and CSS, and saw some swift. So far so good ! And here I am, from the zero to a “decent” programmer.

Phase 7 — Game Dev

Really, I didn’t dive into game Dev enough. I had a rough unlovely quest with game dev, I shall write about one day. One day, in 2019, I came across Fancade, the fan-made arcade, where people create and play games right on thier phone. Developed by Martin Magni, it gives you a voxel editor, visual scripting 3D blocks, game store and more.