When I was a Teenager, I went to an electrionics store and told an employee I was looking for a PC I could play games on. He pointed me to a "New", out-of-date HP desktop with an integrated graphics cpu and assured me, "this is the absolute best system for you!". Of course, I was naive and took him for his word. Everybody loves an honest salesman...

Anyway... $550 and an ignored receipt later you could probably imagine how confused I was when I tried to play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a very well optimized game made in 2012, and it ran at 16 frames per second on the lowest setting, I was devistated...

Coping with a box of questions

Bitterness aside, having this "paper-weight" opened me up to modifying save files in my console games, which lead to experimenting with softwares I found interesting or useful, and naturally, being naive, making mistakes that would give my computer viruses, or conflicting driver issues, which in turn I would try to fix myself. Searching google, trial and error processes, trying to find the answer to a question that hasn't been answered yet by using the solution to another problem to lead you to a similar fix, all the awesome troubleshooting stuff. If you make enough mistakes deep enough in your file explorer it turns out, you need to reinstall your operating system entirely, nothing is more confusing than downloading linux with no true reason to have it, while having only known microsoft as an operating system. Needless to say, that didn't last long being a kid that, for the most part just wanted to game on the PC. I eventually re-sold it with windows 10 installed onto the system.

But then I decided I would build my own

And I wasn't just going to throw my money at the first thing this time, because with a great search engine, comes great results. Who'd have thought?... After some research on how to compare components, I found userBenchmark. (I highly reccomend if you want to see a heirarchy list of components' average performance) and used it to compare prices of similar parts reccomend by people online for the types of games I wanted to play, this let me make a budget and buy my computer peice by peice while working at my line cook closing job. It took about 7 months to get all of my parts, but after re-seating my RAM for the third time I set my bios to run my RAM in XMP profile, booted my uefi drive, installed windows and read the fabled "Hello" message

I finally have what I wanted... now what?

Okay, I can play any game I want at max settings, but the games are getting boring, and learning more about the limitless potential what could be achieved with something that looks as simple as a rock is so much more appealing. But when you're looking at it from the outside where do you start? I love watching youtube videos (Throwback to when Makemebad35 was in the top 10 creators around 2007-2009. If you remember, I prey for our sanity) and having been around youtube for so long and seeing streaming platforms start to pop up everywhere I decided I'd try streaming a game I really liked to play called Escape From Tarkov, which went suprisingly well. I only streamed for about 7 months during that crazy virus that shut down the planet but I enjoyed interacting with all the new people who came to watch and made some good friends along the way.

A motivation to build something

I experimented with Blender, following a tutorial to animate a doughnut in 3d. One thing I've found difficult is using multiple applications in a workflow, but looking back now, it helps to know the scope of what you're trying to acheive before you get too ambitious. For example, I wanted to make a game so I download blender to make a model for the game, at this point I don't know the game engine I'm using to create an asset, I don't even know how to make the model a game asset, so I'm just wasting my time aimlessly tutorial hopping.

Taking a left turn for no reason

I have Attention Deficit Disorder, and sometimes I'll become side-tracked while making a plan and go all in. So, you're interested in making things? one might say, Developing things? you want to work with computers? "IT people work with computers, I should learn IT things!", so I buy myself a course that outlines the steps needed to gain the experience needed to start a job at a help desk. While not necessarily the worst idea ever, creating an Active directory, clearing DNS caches, typing ipconfig alot, remote networking between virtual and physical machines, all that is interesting and cool in it's own right, and I'm more than happy to learn more about it when I need it. Building software that people interact with is way more fun to me than changing passwords and networking.

Taking a more structured approach

After a few months of just doing tutorial after tutorial, and introducing myself to the concept of doing projects with the ITcourse. as a means of gaining useful experience in the field I'm trying to find a carrer in (In heindsight I didn't need to take, free resources are plenty online). I eventually discovered FreeCodeCamp, I've been following the courses in order and this has been a terrific source of information for me, and it has allowed me to code the website you're currently viewing. I hope my story shows that it can be chaotic trying to learn something new, but everytime you fail, you gain new foresight that can help you succeed. I know I mentioned wanting to make a game at one point, and I certinally will as a side-project in the future. this website is still in development :P