Not too long after I realized the power of Java, I found a book online called Teach Yourself Java in 21 days. This was only the beginning, and over the next month my interest in programming continued to grow. With every Google search, I started to realize that if I knew how to write code, I could build my own software. After numerous times waiting for the game to load, my interest in Java was piqued and this led me down the rabbit hole of software development. It didn’t take long before I was hooked on this popular online role-playing game.įor those who don’t know it was built with Java. The most addicting game of them all was Runescape. All of my friends would meet up on these games daily to play, and we slowly shifted from being outside most of the day, to playing online. Most days, I would spend the majority of my time playing Call of Duty, Gears of War, Runescape, and whatever else I could get my hands on. It all started when I found myself lost in the gaming world. Over the next couple of years, I would go on to make ~$200,000 of gross income. To give you some perspective, 10 years ago I was in 9th grade, 13 years old, with just three months of self-taught coding experience. I didn’t have an official title or anything, but I was writing scripts in Java.

Nine years ago today (wow!) I got my first remote gig writing software. In that article, I alluded to the even larger story about how I got into software. Me 15 in my room where the magic happened.Ībout three years ago, I published a story about how the Twitter app I built in high school, Follow, reached 150,000 downloads in two years.

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