I've been coding for a while now, and it all started with Scratch. When I was 9, I found Scratch and got hooked almost immediately. If you don't know what Scratch is, it's a website where you can make games, animations, and other projects using drag and drop blocks instead of typing code.
At first, I was just making random stuff for fun. Most of it wasn't very good, but I didn't really care. I liked seeing what I could build and figuring out how things worked. Eventually, a couple of my projects blew up and got way more attention than I expected. Seeing thousands of people play something I made was honestly crazy.
My dad noticed how much time I was spending on Scratch and signed me up for coding classes. That's where I started learning real programming.
Going from Scratch to actual code was way harder than I thought it would be. I already understood the logic. I knew what loops were. I knew what variables were. I knew how programs were supposed to work. Actually writing the code was the hard part. Suddenly I had to worry about syntax, missing semicolons, random errors, and code that looked perfectly fine but still refused to run. It felt like I was learning everything all over again.
Even though it was frustrating sometimes, I kept building things and slowly got better. Looking back, Scratch helped a lot because it taught me the way programmers think before I ever wrote a line of code.
Over the next few years I learned more technologies and started building bigger projects. What started as making games on Scratch turned into building websites, developer tools, applications, and open source projects. It's kind of funny to think that everything I'm doing now started because I clicked on a random website when I was 9.
If you're getting into programming, my advice is simple. Just build stuff. Don't spend all your time watching tutorials. Make games. Make websites. Make tools. Most of your projects probably won't be amazing, and that's fine. That's how I learned, and honestly, it's still how I learn today.