How I Started Coding

The question I get asked most often — at competitions, in interviews, in conversations — is: how did you start?

The honest answer is: impulsively. I saw something that looked interesting and I chased it without knowing where it would lead.

The Moment It Clicked

I was 12. I'd been curious about computers for a while — not just using them, but understanding what was happening inside. A video I stumbled across showed someone writing a few lines of Python and making the computer do something visible, something real. I remember thinking: that's it. That's the thing I want to learn.

I didn't have a laptop of my own at first. I used whatever I could access. I wrote code on notebooks before typing it in. I memorized syntax the way other kids memorized sports statistics.

Self-Teaching as a Discipline

Everything I know about code, I taught myself. That's not a brag — it's a context. Self-teaching requires a specific kind of stubbornness. You have to be willing to sit with not knowing for a long time, to try things that fail, to read documentation that confuses you and come back to it until it doesn't.

Python was the right first language for me. It's forgiving enough to let you see results quickly, but deep enough to grow into. I spent a year just in Python before branching out.

What I'd Tell My 12-Year-Old Self

Start earlier. Break more things on purpose. Don't wait until you understand everything to build — you learn faster by building than by preparing to build.

And above all: build things you care about. Not things that look impressive on a portfolio. Things that make you angry enough at the current state of the world that you need to fix them.

That's what's kept me going. Not discipline alone — conviction.