How I became a 16-year-old full-stack developer
By: Nuno Martins
Tags: Development, JavaScript, Programming, Full Stack, Python

How I Started My Journey

I’ve always loved the Internet and technology in general. I was born in 2003, so in my first years with computers, I was using Windows XP. Oh God, I loved it. Seriously, it was amazing. I spent hours playing games like Pinball, and I’ve painted a lot of masterpieces with MS Paint. And I used to play other games like Crazy Taxi, The Sims, and more. I always had an interest in technology, and I always wondered how things worked.

Well, when I was 7 years old (I think) I got my first (just mine) computer. Here in Portugal, it was usual to give kids a laptop in 2nd grade. It was called a “Magalhães” (a reference to Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer) and it was the thing that kids of that age wanted the most. It was full of educational programs and it was really good for a 7-year-old. Windows 7 ran on it, and it was the most wonderful and precious thing in the universe for me.

Portátil Magalhães 2 — the most wanted thing by 7-year-olds in 2010/2011

As everything has to end, it broke. My father sent it to be fixed, but eventually, it was slow enough that it couldn’t be useful (by “useful” I mean playing videogames. I was keen on them back then).

I got another computer, and then I remember my father buying a broken Magalhães just for pieces — maybe he could fix whatever was wrong with mine. But it didn’t matter anymore, because I had a desktop PC and it was faster than my old Magalhães, even though not as funny.

Then an incredible and life-changing idea came into my mind: since my father hadn’t been able to fix my Magalhães, I thought I could use the pieces he had bought to create my own personal videogame console.

OUYA, the biggest inspiration for my journey

I was so innocent then…

I’d read about a console named OUYA and I was impressed by its proposal: a completely new console that was based on Android and was free to modify and create games for. So, I wanted to create a console based only on my Magalhães pieces.

Needless to say that I didn’t — and still don’t — have enough knowledge to create a project that big, but I was really excited about it. After reading some articles on the Internet I decided that I just had to learn C and Assembly to build my operational system.

It would be easy, I thought…

Well, guess what? When I saw the first line of Assembly I started to cry. Not literally, but you understand what I mean.

Goodbye console project.

Fast forward to a couple of years later. A friend and I decided that it would be nice if we started a corporation like Microsoft or Apple (P.S. we were only 13). It would be great. We would create a lot of programs and applications and we would get famous and swim in money.

Our dreams were kinda like this… — Photo by Chiara Daneluzzi on Unsplash

Let’s get started, we thought. And what was the first big step to creating a big corporation and earning millions of Euros?

That’s right — create a Facebook/Twitter page.

After that, we had to start creating our apps and programs, but neither of us was able to program. Not even a little bit. Not even a single line of Python, Java, PHP, not even my old friend C!

And what did we do, you may ask? Exactly…

What we didn’t do was learn how to code. Instead, we thought it would be great to follow a series of untrustworthy YouTube videos on how to create a web browser in Visual Basic.

Really innovative for our big corporation, right?

And guess what? We created our browser! I even hosted a website on Weebly (with a .com address — I don’t know how I managed to convince my father to buy me one, really) to share this masterpiece with the world.

Not a single soul cared.

But this little thing, my friends, was the start of my journey. That’s what made me into the developer I am today. That first contact with Visual Basic (although I’d tried to learn Java when I was young, I gave up) and with real programming (even though I was copy-pasting everything the guy on the video said).