TimConceivable!
Early Life
I have always enjoyed doing creative things like making art and solving problems. When I was a kid I loved building things with Lego blocks, taking things apart to see how they worked, and playing puzzle games like Myst.
I remember following instructions from a kids' magazine to make some very simple text adventure games with Visual Basic, but text adventures weren't as interesting to me as contemporary graphical video games, and I guess coding never interested me as much as art did.
A Career
For decades I wanted to make art my career, but wasn't sure how to do that. I wanted to draw comics for Marvel or be an animator at Disney or something, but I always struggled when given an art assignment or when money was involved. After many many years I've decided that maybe it is better to keep art as a hobby just for my own enjoyment.
In the early 2000s I considered a career in web design. I took some classes where I learned HTML, CSS, and used Macromedia Dreamweaver (now owned by Adobe). I enjoyed making web pages, but felt my eye for design wasn't good enough.
It wasn't until around 2010 when I found a game development meetup group that it occurred to me that making video games was a thing I could do. My first experience working on games was making art during game jams. I collaborated with programmers, writers, and musicians on several tiny games made in just a weekend. It was a lot of fun, and I was making art AND games!
Eventually, I got curious about coding games myself and started exploring that with a game engine called GameMaker. GameMaker has a visual code-block method to program games but it also has it's own coding language (GML), which syntactically is similar to Javascript. I started out using the code blocks, but quickly found there were limits to what could be done with them. So little by little I learned actual code as my game aspirations got more ambitious.
LaunchCode
Despite coding games for a few years, I still felt like I didn't really know how to code properly. A few of my game dev friends suggested I should take a LaunchCode course, and finally, in 2018 I did.
In just a few months I learned Python and C# web development skills and graduated from the LC101 course, but I still felt like I wasn't ready for a coding career and wasn't sure if it was something I really wanted either. So I let 5 years slip by before deciding to take LaunchCode's course again to brush up on my coding knowledge and finally commit to starting a career in code.
This time I'm learning Javascript (with Node and React) and Java web development. Besides the new languages, there are quite a few differences between this course and the previous one. I'm already feeling more confident as a programmer and excited to start a career in web dev! I'm definitely not going to stop making games, but it will continue to be a hobby for me.