i'm a hobbyist programmer.... i actually studied communications science (journalism, PR, marketing (which i really dislike the most, etc).. I was a gaming journalist for like 5 years, also did a lot of audiovisual work, filming, editing, etc for a bunch of companies doing institutional content, it was honestly soul-crushing and i hated every second of it, specially having to take photos of politicians i can't stand in my country....

please don't try to find a "bridge" between my career and coding, i've tried, it's not the same thing, editing video isn't hard for me, it's actually so easy that it's boring, it feels empty and i have zero motivation to do it, it just makes me feel stuck like i never reached my full potential or something.

I found programming by accident and fell in love immediately, yeah it has its fair share of frustration but i always come back to it, always trying to go deeper.

years ago when i was bored at a graphic design job where i literally had nothing to do, i started with the codecademy javascript intro, that was my first window into code, pretty basic stuff obviously....

then i tried making games in unity because games are my main motivation for learning, i did some simple things but with total beginner mistakes, i left it for a bit while i was a gaming journalist which was a job that basically fell from the sky...

after leaving journalism i went back to coding, this time with AI tools around, and i went straight for the "final boss" that used to scare me: C++, i learned pointers, memory management.... yeah, at first I vibe coded, but not like not learning it, i asked the AI, and i still do it, to explain exactly what every single line was doing, line by line, everything, even the #endif, everything.... i didn't want to have any doubts about anything and AI is great for that, but of course the more i learned the more i noticed its flaws but i know how to handle it now

I kept going and started making simple text console application games, then graphical games with old libraries in legacy environments because i love software archaeology (MSVC 6.0, C++ 98, then .NET 2003), i used allegro 4 and made my first street fighter 2 engine, buggy as hell but it worked, then i made a super mario bros 1-1 engine, 100% identical, physics, collisions, everything perfect, no bugs, it was beautiful....

then i ported it to raylib, then SDL (with some vibe coding), learned raycasting and it basically fried my brain for 3 weeks straight.

During this last year and a half, i've been obsessed with learning really old and complex architectures, like the stuff from the stone age, totally obsolete, like the IBM 1401, i learned how to program basic stuff in punch cards with machine code (thanks to the rolffson's emulator), i learned how to make an adder on the altair 8800 using other emulators, i even explored visual c++ 1.10 just to see how it was to not even have strings or bools, having to manage the buffer and replicate the backspace behavior with return carrier (\r) and all that stuff.. what can i say? i love it, i love to understand all those little trivialitys, i love programming in the sense of mechanizing reason, i studied the pascaline, the writer's automaton of jacque droz, for me its art but it is also something else!! right now i'm building a basic engine for MS-DOS 6.22 using borland c++ 4.52 and hitting the hardware directly with outportb and using defining my INT_TO_FIXED and using bit switching for optimization!

it's my hobby and i love it, i have like 20 or 30 virtual machines (vmware, pcem, 86box, dosbox-x) because i'm a fan of history in general and that includes tech history.

i studied communications because i didn't know what else to do, i was a musician since i was a kid but at 15 i told myself it had no future in my country, maybe i was too young to realize i was closing the only door i loved but i did it with conviction.... i looked for other careers and found nothing, i was just a kid who loved composing and playing multiple instruments and loved video games (now i don't just play them, i study and create them)

but i didn't study what i wanted, and by the time i realized it was too late to quit, so i've been miserable working in that field, only journalism was tolerable because of the gaming aspect.

maybe that repression or melancholy is what follows me when i code in these old environments.

it reminds me of going to my dad's office as a kid, seeing those windows 95 machines and using ms-paint... in my head i imagine a parallel world where i studied programming right after high school and maybe they would've taught me java in eclipse back in 2007, or even if i was born earlier and programmed in the 90s with turbo pascal or borland c++

i imagine all those scenarios and that's why this is my hobby, it's a response to everything i've lived through, a late love for coding just because.... don't judge me it's just a hobby!! but as you can see i really need some direction....

and please, like i said before.... don't ask me to merge my career with this... i'm serious, I DONT WANT TO, just the thought of opening a video editor makes me feel sick.... i can do it but not as my main thing.... i thought about documenting my progress on youtube but i don't know anything about that market.. maybe i should? idk, i just want to be happy doing what i do and get paid for it.

and yeah, everything i know about programming, i learned it on my own, ALONE