The first thing I remember is writing a space invaders clone in BASIC on a a 386 25MHz with 4mb of RAM. It was challenging without internet access, I invented

The first thing I remember is writing a space invaders clone in BASIC on a a 386 25MHz with 4mb of RAM. It was challenging without internet access, I invented things like the game loop, and tried to compartmentalise the enemy code vs input code, First version cleared and redrew the screen every frame, then I learnt about blacking out the characters and only drawing the essentials (it was all ASCII based I didn't know how to draw graphics) Looking back on it, I can see there's a bunch of polling where there should be events, the game loop is full of input code, and lots of global state and gotos But I was pretty young at the time, about 8 or so - it was the first proper development project I made and the first time I thought "hey, this software stuff is complex!!" I fondly remember spending hours trying to hold the program state in my head, being so inexperienced at programming I was oscillating between getting distracted by implementation details or thinking too abstract to be useful - I practiced shifting up and down the abstraction layers to try and hold all this complexity (not knowing terminology or really understanding what I was doing) so challenging and fun!