Wow, this really took me back! My first real experience with coding was the NeHe OpenGL Tutorials (which are still available online ironically). At the time I

Wow, this really took me back! My first real experience with coding was the NeHe OpenGL Tutorials (which are still available online ironically). At the time I was writing a visualization plugin for an early version of Winamp, and I downloaded all NeHe's tutorials and saved them offline, as well as the OpenGL reference and Visual C++ CHM help file. I would then go down to spend time with my grandparents in Southern Ohio, without any kind of Internet access, no cell phone back in those days, and a barely Pentium laptop. I later hauled my desktop down there, but most of the time was spent out on the deck with my shitty laptop. It was amazing. I would just spend the entire day coding and learning, while my grandmother read her book, out in the wilderness, looking out over a picturesque lake every now and then to clear my mind and think about a problem I was having, or to ponder the next steps in what I wanted to learn or do. Especially hard problems would require a nature walk while I thought about how to best represent things in the real world and grasped 3D graphics concepts for the first time. In between breaks we would take turns getting up and making tea for one another, and every now and then I would make something cool, or learn something for the first time, and excitedly have to show my grandmother, who would immediately tell me I was "so smart" and shake her head in amazement of "modern technology". Towards the end my grandfather put up speakers and we listened to old 50's and 60's big bands out on that deck during these trips. I think more than anything these were the shared experiences that got me into coding and really opened my mind up to the possibilities. These days, this kind of situation and environment is hard to replicate. Things are just so unnecessarily complex and now all our tools expect an Internet connection to work. It makes me sad that today's generation will probably never know the kind of experience I had. There is something about not having the Internet at your fingertips that forces you to reason through things on your own and find your own powerful source of creativity rather than the route search/download someone else's code that we all do now.