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

I love this, because I can relate to it a lot, my story is very similar.

I started at age 12, with QBasic and VB6, writing Trojans because that was what fascinated me at the time. A few years later, when .NET was introduced, I moved over to VB.NET. At the time, I was playing a web-based game called "BootLeggers.us". When I got into an accident, my leg was messed up, and I couldn't move off of a couch for a few days (stairs were not possible), I was still young and alone @home for a week because my parents were on holiday. I laid on that couch for 3 days, playing BootLeggers on a laptop, with my arm on a side-table. The worst position ever. I did this nearly 3 days straight, and it was when I first got carpal tunnel. I couldn't do anything for quite a while because it felt like my arms were on fire all the time :-/

Some time passes, and I can use a computer again for a bit, without too much pain, but I was no longer able to play Bootleggers, since I could not stay on the PC for that lang due to my carpal tunnel.

The game is basically a set of actions you can do every X time. I had written small 'timer' applications that warn you when your next action is available, and I thought: why not automate a bit more of the game, since I can't play it for the duration I want to myself, so I started creating an application to do so. I've spent about a year and created a bot that could do everything in the game. It used an embedded webbrowser that was fully automated, so it was not detectable. You could play the game yourself in the application, and if you'd stop, the app would take over and continue playing, that way you could do complex interactions with people yourself if you wanted, and add some non-obvious behaviour, making it harder to detect.

At the time, I was able to run the bot for weeks on end; I had it set up to take around 3 hours of downtime each day to make sure it would be 'defendable' to have a lot of activity, still, my account would rank faster than any other on the platform.

The game then introduced CAPCHAs to the game, and the bot would not be able to continue. So, I created my own OCR engine and got it working again. Over the time, I've written 3 complete new implementations of the OCR engine, each working better than the previous. It was amazing to do and I learned a lot from it. Had a whole crew who I shared my programs with, had it locked down on your CPU serialnumber, HDD serialnumber and mac address to prevent it spreading to people who were not 'authorised', etc.

It was definetively the thing that really made me more in love than ever with programming, the sheer power you wield and adoration you get from people you share your stuff with was amazing.

Only thing that came close to this, was when I created the first online rainbowtable lookup serivce for hacking Tompson modems (got me on national tv news for a feature peace years later as well. It's dutch but you can watch it here if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfCEe9MuZg ↗ ).

Been writing software ever since I was 12, and still love it now. I started my own company finally two months ago after being the CTO of a startup for a year, and I'm so happy I did it, because I feel like, now I might get some time to get into some crazy project again :)

I have so much more to tell, but I think I'll take some more time later on and just write a big blogpost, but it was fun to relive some of that history again :)

Oh yeah, loved to read this! Gaming and especially moddable games are a great entry into programming.

It wasn't exactly my entry, as I had programmed stuff before, but I learned a huge lot during my university time while writing a database site for World of Warcraft, which also had a distributed data collection mechanism by which hundreds of thousands of users could upload data gathered while playing the game to my site, where it would all be distilled into a database, of which a special, minified copy was then compiled and offered to be downloaded by the players right into the game, to be used while playing as a knowledge base. And alongside of that, people could query the database via a web frontend that used all the latest shit (it was 2007 or 2008, AJAX was a big deal back then, reactive layouts were in their infancy, but I had one, and I even wrote a 3D model viewer in the browser and something like Google Maps to view pre-rendered maps of the game world that looked like satellite images). That thing was 60k LOC Java (data processing and website), 30k LOC Lua (for the addon in the game), about 5k LOC ActionScript, some hundred lines of PHP and Bash scripts, and about 5-10k LOC of C++ for the native client to do data uploads and downloads. I eventually sold it for about 60k€ including maintenance, and maintained it as a side project for 7 years total (most of the time I was also actively playing WoW) and then it was abandoned because the site didn't catch on enough among the competition, and the game itself assimilated lots of the functionality provided by my in-game database (which was named MobMap and did catch on massively with the players, I counted at least 1.1 million installs over it's lifetime) so that successful service became redundant over time and was eventually discontinued as well.

But that project brought me lots of experience. Different programming languages and runtime environments and contexts, operating a multi-server infrastructure all by myself, using the latest web tech before there were frameworks that did all the hard things for you, maintaining a codebase over a long period, reverse-engineering (to get some of the data out of the game you had to reverse the original game data file formats, and since they changed with every patch, that was a continued activity done by a very small community of people in obscure online wikis, to which I eventually started contributing), updating large numbers of client installs in a secure and reliable way, processing gigabytes of raw data per day into a concise database (I think it was about 50GB XML incoming per day and the final DB was 4GB MySQL - and it was pre-SSDs, so I had to work all in memory with that DB to get the insert and update speeds I needed), this project had it all, and I continue to draw from those lessons in my job today.

Ah, its nice to reminicse!

Back in my day, games weren't online, and I didn't really have the hardware to do them justice, nor the money to buy good hardware or games either. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D from a cover-disk in a tiny postage-stamp sized window. At school we used to pass around cover-disks because we couldn't all afford to buy every mag.

Anyway, I kind of started programming from the get-go, and for a long time, programming _was_ my game. By the time I got to uni I found myself writing modding tools and editors for various games that my friends played or wanted to make mods for.

By then I had somehow found myself in a 'rogue' part of a very big company. I was surrounded by contractors making £60/hour so I started my own contracting company and was soon making way more money than I've ever made since.

Once I graduated I went into normal being-an-employee mode, and things have been getting financially worse ever since.

So its interesting, scary and confusing to read this guy's account of how he dropped out of school and has set up a stream of companies to sell his small products. Interesting, obviously. Scary, because I fear that some young people are reading it and thinking "I don't need school! I can make money!". Its the same way I get all scared when my daughters tell me how much youtubers apparently make. And confusing, because I can't spot the value in any of the products and stuff he has created recently. I guess I really don't get this whole social online world?! Perhaps I went in entirely the wrong direction all those years ago when I went and got a normal job?

Good luck to him!

Not sure what advice I'd give to a young kid now, though. To be honest, I'm not very keen on being an employee. But would you tell a kid to drop out of school and try and get funding for an app they sell to colleges etc?

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 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.

I like reading all the posts where people are like, "Hey, that's my story, too!" Uplifting thread.

It most certainly takes motivation (I say passion) to become a self-taught programmer. I think the "larval stage" (http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/larval-stage ↗) is critical. That transformation makes you a different kind of programmer.

I am also a self-taught programmer, but I came at it from a different angle, long before this internet age. I wasn't hacking on games (although I did do that sometimes). I was hacking the machine (PC-XT!) and the OS and software that ran on it. I was fascinated. I went from command-line, to scripting, to Microsoft C, and then it took off from there, and I've been at it professionally uninterrupted since 1990.

I didn't go back to school for CS, though. I wish I did, and am happy to see other people here have. I think that's important. I had to teach myself all the best practices (thank goodness for "Code Complete") or learn them on the job.

This probably isn't 100% kosher, but this kind of story is a good indicator when hiring. If you ask how someone got their start and it's this kind of self-motivated journey they invariably make good employees. Over the years we've most certainly noticed there is a significant difference in value between someone who chose programming because it's a job and someone where programming chose them.