I first joined this forum and started programming with Codea 6 years ago when I was 14 years old. The only experience I had with programming was some self-taught Scratch experience. If you look at some of my past posts it is clear to say that I didn’t really know what I was doing back then (my favorite post is when I asked how to restart a for loop, it doesn’t even make sense). I had no formal programming lessons, everything I knew was completely self-taught (and I wasn’t very good at it). The Codea community helped and inspired me to spend my entire summer that year building a 2D side-scrolling game. At the end of the summer, I had gone from not even understanding what a for loop was, to building out an entire fully-functional game.
Sadly, I stopped using Codea shortly after I made my game and decided to try and learn new technologies. As the programming world is vast, I haven’t come back until a few days ago when my much younger brother asked me the best way to start making a game (Codea was the obvious answer). I’ll be honest, when I clicked to visit the forum again I did not know what to expect. I hadn’t done anything with Codea for 5 and a half years and didn’t know if, with the fast pace of technology, the community would still be active. I was overjoyed to see that the community is still going on strong with frequent new posts.
Codea and its community were the catalysts that kicked off my passion for programming. Since that summer 5 and a half years ago I have gone on to continue my passion for programming by learning new languages/technologies and participating in hackathons/programming competitions. I am now halfway through a major in Computer Science with multiple Software Engineering Internships under my belt. I truly do not think any of that would have happened if it weren’t for Codea and the positive experiences I had with the community.
So, to wrap things up I want to say thank you to everyone who is/was a part of this amazing community. You truly make a difference. And to all of you who may be new to programming… just keep going, ask lots of questions, and learn as much as you can. You never know where it might lead.