Programming

Since I was in kinda year 3 or 4 I developed an interest in programming. I didn't really know what started it since at the time I knew nothing about it, and I wasn't consuming any programming 'media' or playing games.

In year 5 I wrote my first program. I googled something along the lines of "How to make a game easy" and followed the first tutorial that showed up. It was a bash tutorial. At this time the only 'proper' game I had played was Minecraft so idk why I even wanted to make games. I was stuck making bash games for way too long, and it definitely held me back a lot. I stuck with bash because I was always too scared to move onto a 'real' language (thought it'd be too hard) As well as games, I also made lots of fake operating systems with bash for some reason. This is where my love of ascii graphics (especially those using box-drawing characters) came from. I still love this stuff so much.

In year 7 I finally moved on from bash and started web development. This was so revolutionary. I had forgotten my pe gear whilst we were in the gym one day. My teacher made me do work on Education Perfect New Zealand learning website thing we used at school (maths I think) but instead I saw a website class and did that. I completed the whole thing within the singular pe class, and that was kinda all the html learning I ever did. It was so fun and easy and I was instantly hooked. Next, I followed a css tutorial series on YouTube and then kinda expanded from there. I love webdev so much.

Around year 7/8 I gave Java a go. I was pretty rubbish at it. I actually learnt from a kinda joke tutorial by this random Russian youtuber (cannot find it anymore) but I really really liked it. I vividly remember in one of my first programs I made a new scanner object for each time I wanted input (not good) I tried to use swing, but I didn't really like it. I think the most impressive thing I made with swing was a non-functioning version of minesweeper.

In year 10 everything changed. I signed up for DTS, School subject (digital technology studies) where I was shown Python. I really really loved Python, but it always felt too 'basic', especially coming from Java. Regardless, I was making things 10x cooler than I had with Java. Only about two weeks into learning Python I decided that I didn't like it and I wanted to move onto something better. I wanted the ease of Python with the power and syntax of Java, so I chose C#. Brackeys, the gamedev youtuber, had just recently released his C# tutorial series and I followed that religiously. I fell in love the second I touched C#. There genuinely is no language better. I was so blown away by how easily I could change stuff like the consoles text color and title.

Until this point, everything I had been writing was simple console programs. Around about year 11 I tried C# bindings for SFML for the first time and was completely blown away at how awesome it was. This was my first proper time using a graphics library, which meant I could make 'real' games. I worked with SFML for about a year before finally finding the holy grail of libraries: Raylib.

If I wrote about how much I love raylib it would genuinely be 100 paragraphs. There is no better library.

In 2025 I started University (still there rn) where I am studying software engineering for game development. Since I already knew how to code, in the first year of the classes I got lazy and decided that I would not hand in the work (thought it was a waste of time) This was a pretty big mistake. I had to redo the entire first semester, making my 3 year course last 3.5 years. I will never ever slack ever again ever in the history of ever all time ever forever again ever. Doing something actually fun in school is a really weird feeling. I really like university.

Statistics

I put kinda 70-80% of my projects on GitHub. Even this website is there. Below are some of my github stats! I also use WakaTime, which is an awesome tool that tracks how many hours you spend coding. I wish that I started using it earlier than I did. I'd like to show you my WakaTime stats in an awesome graph but lowk none of the apis that I can find are working rn and I'm too lazy to do more research. I did get the Badge though. You can just look at my account here.

Teaching

I love to teach. I would not mind a job as an actual teacher ngl. I've taught many of friends how to code (both 'actual' languages and webdev) If you'd like to be taught then please dm @MTMB on Discord me (keen)