Two weeks ago, I wrapped up my sophomore year at college and I realized it was a bit of a milestone year for me,
because it marked the tenth year since I started coding.
Now ten years is a big milestone for a 19 year old (that's over half of my life).
And you know code has taken me on a pretty crazy journey so far,
that i have no idea where it's gonna take me from here.
But I thought it'd be kind of fun to make a video,
reflecting on these past 10 years in kind of the journey that has taken me on (with around a minute for every year).
[MUSIC]
So 2009 I got really lucky because my best friend at the time was a little bit ahead of the curve,
and so when his dad was looking for someone to make a webpage for him,
he decided that he was gonna learn.
So he picked up basic HTML and CSS,
and because I was his best friend I learned too now.
Now, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of code from the early years,
but I did find this beautiful webpage that I sent to my friend in May of 2010 where I was writing a little tutorial on HTML.
HTML is a cool language of coding to learn
It is a very basic coding language yet much can be done with it
You know as you can see, I mastered the art of content creation early
You know at this point we were just kids having fun
We weren't, you know trying to get a head start on APCs or anything like that
Like we were literally just playing around in our classroom computers for fun
You know in grade six pick things up a little bit, you know, I already had some HTML & CSS
I figured what's next JavaScript, only I didn't really learn JavaScript
I just learned how to copy-paste JavaScript to make my webpages a little more interactive
Actually in May of 2011,I uploaded my first
coding video to this YouTube channel shown off this super cool menu that's animated, you know awesomesauce
So also in grade 6 I learned how to make minecraft mods only again
I didn't really I just learned how to (inaudible) the code and then change one or two lines
To make a really minor tweak, so you'll remember in 2011
If you're a real minecraft fan that you didn't used to be able to build fences on top of each other
Well, I changed the one line of code that allowed you to do this and then released it
You know as my most downloaded mod got like 200 downloads or something and years later. It's in the game. So Mojang. You're welcome
Alright so by grade 7 I had already picked up, you know some actual JavaScript I learned how to write some code
So I was able to do things from scratch like in September of 2011
I made this little web page with these fish swimming around on it
But then I kind of stepped out of the realm of web programming
So in grade 7 I picked up what is still my favorite programming language-Python
And I remember the exact project where I picked it out to my best friend
We wanted to make a program that would flip coins for us, but not just you know one coin
We want it to flip millions of coins and then we wanted to know, you know
What is it percentage of heads and tails?
How many heads in a row where we likely to get if we flipped a million coins things like that?
So to answer these questions, we figured out how to write a little Python script and then we put that script on github
Where you can still download it and run it today and it still works. I mean the code is is bad. It's not great
Um, but it's a fun little program. It's the same type of thing. I'd write today
It's just a little hundred line piece of code to answer some obscure curiosity that I have
It might not be useful to the general population, but it answers a question that I wanted to know
So gradate I took my newfound Python skills and entered the world of competitive
programming, you know make-or-break do-or-die stuff,no in reality
these were very chilled competitions, the way they worked you had three hours to answer five questions
And the questions if you were clever enough you could usually solve in one or two lines of code
Although I didn't really know that at the time but it usually 10 or 20 lines of code for me
Did you know I was ok at these
I wasn't you know top in the country, but I did make the honor roll, you know got perfect on 4 out of 5 questions
No big deal
Kind of peaked in grade eight
it's been a bit of it downhill ever since. So then in the summer after grade 8 I started to just make a bunch of
Little things here and there so I made a web app that rolled dice
I made one that plotted points and I made a Python script that generated static web pages kind of like a content management system
None of these things were super greater or super useful, but they were just fun to make and to share with my firm
So in grade 9 high school hits and we didn't have grade 9 computer science my best friend that I've been coding with for the
past you know four years had gone to a different high school
So didn't actually code for most of the start of the year, but then in April 2014
I had this idea to build what's called an optical character recognition tool(OCR)
What this is is it's something that you can take a picture of some text some handwritten text and they'll convert it into
Machine readable text on your computer stuff that you would type.So I built a janky little script in Python and it worked
as long as you know
You took a very zoomed in picture of my handwriting written in black pen on white paper
And it was only one line and it was straight you could get what text it was. It was great
So then over the summer I did a program at my local university where they taught us how to code on an Arduino
Which is basically a tiny little computer
That is really easy to interface to hardware like LEDs and switches and sensors and so on
And so I'd then uploaded a video on to this YouTube channel
that's still public showing a little Python script that I wrote that communicated with my Arduino
That lit up an LED every time I had an unread email and in my gmail inbox it's actually kind of useful
So in grade 10
I got really lucky again because I was taking computer science at my school and
The teacher had a PhD and we were learning Python
which I already knew pretty well and so when I cannot blew through the curriculum we had some fun
so my final project was a Python version of the game Othello that actually had a computer AI and
what it used was it's called mini maxing and it had alpha beta pruning
It might just sound like a bunch of words
If you're not familiar with this
basically what it means is it would compute all of the possible mo ves that I could make and that it could make for I think
three or four generations depending on the difficulty
pruning out the ones that were obviously bad and then it would choose the move that would maximize its possible points and minimize my possible points
So it's actually pretty good and you can download it and play it. It's all on github
so then in the summer after grade 10
my friend and I came across an ad for a hackathon which is a
programming competition which in 24 or 48 hours you start from scratch and you build something and then at the end the best
projects win prizes and so we entered, we built a bad project, we lost.
But we kind of fell in love with hackathons and that would kind of shape the next few years
So grade 11 was a big year for me in terms of writing code it started out with a bunch of hackathons
I made things like a robotic hand that open when you clench your jaw a social network for trees
An online platform from learning code and then at the same time in computer science class having a lot of fun building things I built
A reaction diffusion simulator that made really cool patterns that I uploaded here on YouTube
I found the convex hull of points in 3d and I played a lot with the mana broaden with Julia sets
So overall just have a lot of fun, then around this time my buddy
and I released a clicker game on Android called clicky kitty
probably one of the best android games of that year if you ask me,
it had a hundred downloads and then with that same friend for an engineering class
we built a ro bot that would use a webcam to find a tennis ball and then shoot it with a laser pointer, and
then in the spring I wrote a buggy little program that measured the growth rate of trees using Google Street view images
I ended up going to Nationals for science fair with that in winning a silver medal and so finally in the summer after grade 11
I landed a job as a software developer intern at a Canadian tech company called Shopify and
Basically Shopify had sponsored all of hackathons that I had been to and I kept bugging them about hiring high school student
So eventually I got a first round interview and a second and a third round interview
And then I got a job offer and I ended up working on the plus team on the wholesale product
In learning a ton because this is my first time working with actual professionals that knew what they were doing
And it was an amazing experience. I love the compass
Okay, so senior year of high school, I didn't code very much
I was kind of focused on finishing up school and also pouring my energy into other things like these videos
So I did have a few fun little projects though
So I wrote and released a game for Android called eleven
and then I also found this Python library for web scraping that I had a lot of fun playing with
And I built this this program that would track my Instagram, my YouTube following and then in the summer after grade 12
I was back at Shopify working on a very ambitious project called flow that would automate tasks for plus merchants, which is basically
you know if this event happens then do this action, and it was a ton of fun
I was working again with some really smart software developers and I learned a ton about you know
writing good code, good code practices and it kind of shaped a lot of
practices that I fall on my code today
But by the end of the summer, I was kind of ready to go to school
In fall of 2017, I started my freshman year at Harvard where I'd be studying computer science
Queue the thousand angry comments about me click baiting Harvard too much
So the fall was obviously a whirlwind
You know for a number of reasons freshman year always is but I did take the famous cs50 course with David Malan
And for the final project in that course
My friend and I built a mobile app that would find safe locations near you on a map, only
we didn't really have a database of safe locations. So we just plugged in Starbucks's
We just hope that our TF wouldn't notice that we basically just built a Starbucks locator app
He didn't, we got an A
That's the power of marketing. So then in the spring I took another freshman computer science course, this one was functional programming learning
Oh camel, we didn't really build anything cool
But you know
That was okay. And then as my youtube channel kind of blew up, the school year ended and I went back to Shopify
where again, I was on the flow team and I started off by writing code
But then we didn't really have a product manager at the time
So I stepped more into that role and I don't think I did a very good job. I mean it wasn't a terrible job
I didn't have a lot of guidance. I didn't really know what doing and also has kind of burnt out so
In my free time,
I built a few scripts here and there I did some sentiment analysis on YouTube comments for a video
and I wrote a little personal bot that would do things like
You know track followers, track stock prices and so on they were they were cool but not super significant, they were just fun little projects
Alright and this kind of brings me to the last year of my life sophomore year at college
and So in the fall
I took an artificial intelligence course and you can kind of see from like the history of projects that I've done
whether it be like the OCR app or the tree growth app, the Othello game
I've always I kind of had this interest in computers making intelligent decisions
So I had a lot of fun in this course.Our final project for the class was w as a tower defense game that we made
kind of like bloons, where we have machine learning agents figure out where to place towers optimally in order to get the most points
it's kind of my first taste of like real AI and I'm
Kind of hooked. I want to do more and then in the spring I took a more theoretical
Computer science course learned a lot about you know, algorithms and math
But didn't really build or write any code for it
And also it's kind of just trying to be a happy person. Like there was some life events that kind of set me back
So I wasn't really doing a whole lot of productive stuff in my free time
But hey, that's okay. And so that brings us to where we are now the present and what I'm up to right now
So I'm not actually taking an internship this summer, doing something different,
Although I haven't talked about it yet on the channel and there will be a dedicated video for that but it will involve writing code,
It'll involve just writing in general, making videos, all my little passions that I've had and some other things
I unfortunately will not be able to talk about on the YouTube channel
And so that brings us to the end of our of our 10 years of code from writing really bad
HTML tutorials to winning hackathons working on
professional teams writing only kind of bad artificial intelligence
It's been a ride. My life has been absolutely changed by code
but also
my relationship with code has kind of changed over the years, it started off as kind of a novelty something fun that I could just
do with my friends in our classroom, and then it slowly evolved into something until it became a passion
In and of itself in grade 11, I loved writing code. It was so much fun
but since then it's kind of become clear that that code is just a tool, one of many for me to satisfy the
curiosities that I have. So if you made it this far, thank you. I really do appreciate it
Feel free to leave a like, a dislike, a comment,
you know post on reddit clowning me for only being an amateur coder after 10 years
whereas you are a Master Elite computer scientist after only 2. I mean really whatever you want
And if you're new consider subscribing because I do have some fun videos coming your way this summer and in the next year
And you know the foreseeable future but I got to go make them so I'm gonna go do that
You go get on with your life. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you next