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How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

• fbi-director 7y ago
  A nice story of how a young boy's enthusiasm and unhindered spirit got in the right place at the right time. I feel happy for him and his family to stumble upon this path in life - and then smashing it an building his own gold road! Alas, I also feel sad at the same time, for myself not having that opportunity and having wasted my programming skills all together after I went to university,due to outside pressures and chasing my own dick, so to say.
  • ohaideredevs 7y ago
    The funny thing is that someone very close to me knew how to program, and never once did they think it would be cool to show me how. I didn't write my first line of code until I was 26 or so. Maybe even later. To be honest, I think that's how you become good - by working on your own stuff. I feel like my skills are rotting at work. I work with "cool tech," but I basically "learn it" for long enough to implement it and never look at it again.
    • 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
      You become good by spending long amounts of time on your computer, sometimes for 12 hours a day. It is a lonely and solitary activity.
      • pizza 7y ago
        "Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weights." - Ronnie Coleman
      • isodude 7y ago
        Having a good tutor helps alot. It's like having a multiple added to the grinding effect.
      • voltagex_ 7y ago
        Some of the best coders I know are 9-5ers, with busy lives outside of anything to do with computers. I understand where you're coming from but this is also a harmful mindset for anyone coming into the profession - I have been careful to emphasise to the people I'm tutoring to not make my mistakes and sacrifice life outside of work in the pursuit of "better" coding skills.
        • p1esk 7y ago
          Best coders I know became good at coding long before they started working.
      • amatecha 7y ago
        Solitary, sure, but definitely not lonely! I got my 120wpm+ typing speed by chatting for hours and hours with friends online :)
      • gwd 7y ago
        To be fair, long amounts of time practicing is how you get to be a really good musician, or basketball player, or skateboarder, or anything. But that doesn't preclude practicing in the same general area as other people with similar interests. And even if you end up practicing for 4 hours a day entirely by yourself, there are still 12 other waking hours you can spend doing things with other people.
  • moneywoes 7y ago
    I'm dull, what do you mean by chasing your own dick?
    • thrower123 7y ago
      I suspect it has to do with pursuing the carnal pleasures rather than the computational variety.
    • fbi-director 7y ago
      As user 'thrower123' replied, I was busy jackin it and playing with girls which obliterated my previous schedule of learning 24/7 and being eager to do so. I genuinely despise the change that lead to who I am. But as I write this I also realize that it was all me and this is just a bunch of self pity and I'm being a whiny little bitch that should not be scared of doing stuff for fear if not being as easy/able to as when I was younger. Fear of failure? Possibly. Probably. I'm too drunk to keep going and need help. Or money so I can take some time off and work on myself physically and mentally.
  • xwdv 7y ago
    If it’s any comfort the alternative doesn’t turn out much better. Most of my life I looked down on prurient interests and instead chose to master my profession, convinced it had to be the smart choice. Now I find myself on the wrong side of 30 with a collection of useless money and assets slowly coming to accept that I’ll never have that ideal lifelong relationship with someone that matters. Soon I’ll have more years behind me than there are ahead and anyone I find will never have the shared experience of being with me during my prime years. They can never be a life partner now, they are simply a partner joining me as I age and go downhill from here. I wish I had spent more time on the hunt when I still had my entire life ahead of me. So if that’s what you did, don’t worry, it works out better in the end.
    • draw_down 7y ago
      Good grief. Plenty of people are poor AND don’t have someone to love them.
    • newnewpdro 7y ago
      This attitude is not helping your cause at all. Do you have your health? Are you fit? Because if you've taken good care of yourself throughout all these years, you can definitely get yourself a great life partner. If not, then you might have to work on it. Either way, change your outlook if you want to attract quality. People with options won't want to voluntarily subject themselves to this persona, it's miserable, learn to love yourself. The combination of good health and fitness, financial stability, no debt, no kids, no divorce, is exponentially increasingly rare and desirable with age. It's a hell of a catch, a damn unicorn. When I was in my 20s I found fit cougars undesirable as all hell, in my 40s now when I see a fit single woman over 35 without any kids, no divorce, no drama or evidence of crazy, I get very interested. It's the same for women. If you make it into your late 30s and beyond without getting trapped with a bunch of baggage and are in great health, you've dodged multiple bullets! You just have to put yourself out there and meet members of the opposite sex (or same if that's your preference) who are in a similar position and discover your real prime years.
      • p1esk 7y ago
• rootw0rm 7y ago
  wow, this is kinda similar to how I got into coding and reverse engineering. what got me into it was Ultima Online and my first serious effort at learning coding was in C# of all languages. I focused on macroing and I helped pioneer/consolidate hacks across (hundred+?) client versions. I made a macroing client with built in script compilation (C# of course) which included code completion and syntax highlighting back when it was pretty difficult to do. the main difference is I decided to become a drug dealer instead of a professional coder and though I had pretty amazing short term success I'm now considered a violent felon by the state of California.
• Nuzzerino 7y ago
  I had a similar idea for Asheron's Call, to build a modular plugin system for its bots. People could in theory be authorized to receive a plugin, which would be beamed from the server and dynamically injected at runtime. Reasonably secure copy-protection (aside from the rare determined and skilled hacker). I even had about 10k lines of code written, but it wasn't very impressive (although there were some interesting gems). Sadly, the game started getting DDOSed, which led to a sharp drop in population and abandonment of the project around 2014. The game shut down within a couple years after that. I love the concept of making interesting bots for games that aren't originally intended for bots, but it's becoming harder and harder to do so given the issue of cheating. Makes for a major risk to a project that is already hard to justify doing. I believe Blizzard has sued someone for making and selling a game bot, so there is precedent for legal trouble as well, which is very unfortunate for hobbyists.
  • robohydrate 7y ago
    I got my start programming because I was interested in writing plugins for the Decal framework.
• vzhou842 7y ago
  I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people who also do. [1] https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/ https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/
  • Nuzzerino 7y ago
    Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia (1994) has some coverage on the idea of a true hacker and the "curious" personality archetype that matches it. It was more than 10 years ago that I read it and it resonated strongly with me, so perhaps it's worth a read if you like to understand more of the psychological roots. https://www.amazon.com/Cyberia-Trenches-Cyberspace-Douglas-Rushkoff/dp/1903083249 https://www.amazon.com/Cyberia-Trenches-Cyberspace-Douglas-R...
    • dillonmckay 7y ago
      Great author. Both fiction and non-fiction. I highly recommend ‘Exit Strategy’.
  • minderasure 7y ago
    I share that sentiment. My first exposure to programming was some C++ when I was 13th but I gave up 2 months in. It was my fanaticism over playing Runescape that reintroduced me to programming through making bots with SCAR.
  • yangikan 7y ago
    I was planning to introduce my kids to game development this summer. Is Gamemaker still the best platform to introduce kids to game dev? My kids know a bit of scratch...
  • lucidone 7y ago
    I was heavily involved in the private server scene in the late 2000s :-)
  • seibelj 7y ago
    I got into programming because of Runescape as well! Although my beginning was bots written in AutoHotKey that would: 1) Search screen for pixels within the color of bones 2) Pick up bones 3) Bury bones My prayer level went through the roof! Then they implemented "sleep", a system where each action added a bit of "exhaustion" that could only be solved by walking to a bed, sleeping, and typing in a captcha in order to wake up. Killed my bots! But not my love of programming :-)
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• tomglynch 7y ago
  @rodneyg_, the link to 'cold-emailing Mark Cuban' is broken
  • rodneyg_ 7y ago
    Thank you so much for pointing it out!! Fixed it.
• quickthrower2 7y ago
  These stories are entertaining but one must always remember there is some element of luck when things like this happen, and plenty of people coding side projects and not making a dime. So don't feel bad if you didn't make enough money top buy a house while you were are school!
  • WalterBright 7y ago
    You've got to give luck an opportunity to find you, by getting involved in things. Once the author saw the opportunity, he then pivoted to exploit it through a lot of time and effort. It's pretty clear that other bot makers did not see that opportunity, or saw it and did little.
    • quickthrower2 7y ago
      My perspective is you make your own luck - and really you are making a lottery ticket with probably much better odds than a real lottery ticket, and other upsides (if you fail you gain experience). But it's still a lottery ticket so it is not always useful to disect someone else success and say "oh they woke up at 4am every day, so I'll do that to be successful" etc.
  • imhoguy 7y ago
    Exactly. That is how side-projects usually happen, fun first then money/reputation/skill as (eventual) side-effect.
• rococode 7y ago
  Games with strong user-hosted server ecosystems seem to be a great way for kids to start gaining serious coding experience. I went a similar path with Minecraft servers (and also first started with Runescape, both are in Java) - making a server in highschool and grossing ~$150k in a year and a half. Before making a server, I thought coding was cool, but had never done much beyond running some basic programs. Making a server gave me clear goals that helped me learn coding much faster. "I need to figure out how to add custom bosses so my server will be more fun!" is much more fun and interesting to a teenager than "I need to figure out how to remove a Car object from this list of Car objects". There's also the very important social aspect - seeing other real people enjoy code you wrote is extremely satisfying. And you can do really cool stuff with servers that teaches you real things, moreso than any class could. My own experience writing a ton of custom code for my Minecraft server taught me things like Unix, Redis, MySQL, web dev, reading obfuscated code, networking (like running 8 servers and writing code to pass players from one to another), deployment, basic security, pathfinding algorithms, writing scripting engines, etc. etc. all of which I had no experience with before, and would not have learned for several years otherwise. I'm graduating with my master's in CS now and still haven't been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make. The few other devs of big servers that I knew had similar experiences - started off as beginner programmers, and gained a huge amount of experience from building out a passion project.
  • mattsfrey 7y ago
    Hear hear. I got into coding as a young teen from running a counter-strike server and wanting to make my own adminmod plugins to do more cool stuff on the server, had to learn Small C. Then I wanted to go further than the restricted API adminmod had for plugins so I learned how to build and modify actual adminmod, then metamod, eventually was working in C++ building actual mods for half-life, was all fun and games at the time but gave me a platform for a lucrative career later in life, sweet!
    • ErrantX 7y ago
      My start into real programming was through EventScripts for source servers. Used to love that stuff. Taught me Python too.
• WalterBright 7y ago
  "I began to spend much less time gaming, and the majority of my time developing my bot." That's what happened to me. I started playing games, then modifying them, then writing my own, then the coding consumed all my time. https://www.classicempire.com/history.html https://www.classicempire.com/history.html
• calebio 7y ago
  Great story, Rodney! You've done very well for yourself. My background shares some similar elements of yours during the same time period albeit with a different game, Habbo Hotel, and a lot less money :-). In a few years we'll start to see more from the Minecraft and redstone generation.
• Bucephalus355 7y ago
  Does anyone remember The New Yorker article from June 2018 about the magazine “Teen Boss” that described similar stories regularly, except that it was marketed to pre-teens and teens? The cover of one of their issues is really something to behold: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-very-unnerving-existence-of-teen-boss-a-magazine-for-girls https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-very-unnervi...
  • cheschire 7y ago
    I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.
• jeremysalwen 7y ago
  Wow, exactly how I got into programming too! although I made 40$ in the end instead of 200k :D The timing also matches up pretty well, I wonder if we bumped into each other on the forums. I was on the scar forums, then SRL, but the period I was most active was on villavu (iRobot), after Arga came out I started to become less active. I wasn't at all involved with the RSbot scene and knew almost nothing about it.
  • markus92 7y ago
    Hi there!
    • jeremysalwen 7y ago
      THE GenoDemoN?? How are you and ruler doing? Do you remember Lardmaster? (I also remember that I became inactive, and then some scammer hacked my account, which may have left a bad taste in your mouth because you thought it was me)
• siliconc0w 7y ago
  It's kinda sad how games don't really work this way anymore. There are few open-world sandbox games and mods aren't really a thing. It's "free-to-play" skinner box treadmills from here on out.
  • fastball 7y ago
    Be the change you want to see.
  • rootw0rm 7y ago
    reverse engineering is your friend. i've modded all sorts of stuff that never intended it... Full Tilt Poker back in the day, MechWarrior Online, Ultima Online, etc. Learning how to hook into a program's functions and extract real-time data without destroying the stack, properly calling game functions with your own arguments, and translating your patches to new client versions is all pretty interesting and gratifying IMO.
    • voltagex_ 7y ago
      If you do this in any recent game you'll get banned. If you do this in any Valve game you'll get VAC banned.
      • sean-duffy 7y ago
        Bots get you banned in Runescape too, which is what the OP article is about. What's your point?
        • folkrav 7y ago
          Botting/cheat detection mechanisms have changed and evolved since RS.
  • Sendotsh 7y ago
    Minecraft is still huge, and moddable. Sure lots of people moved to Bedrock edition on Consoles/Win10 but plenty of people still play the Java version and develop mods, resource packs, shader packs, etc. Racing Sims like Assetto Corsa have a decent sized modding community with people designing and coding new car models, modifications to the physics/handling, audio packs, tracks/maps, etc. Flight Sims are the same, and lots of other Simulator games. As for open world games... Skyrim, GTAV, Empyrion, Space Engineers, Terraria, Starbound, are all moddable and have thriving communities. Then there's the entire Steam genre of moddable games: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Moddable#p=0&tab=TopSellers https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Moddable#p=0&tab=TopS... Modding is very much alive and well. I'd suggest just finding any of the above games that interest you and having a play with the mod system. I find it a very entertaining and interesting way to learn more about programming due to the specific constraints of each game.
• phasecode 7y ago
  I remember back around the same time in 2008ish, I was reading the old WoW Glider (Glider was a Bot for WoW) forums and came across someone who was running a massive WoW farm from Germany racking in close to 150k a year. It's so interesting to see the transition both games have gone through to embrace the Pay-To-(Somewhat)-Get-Ahead with both WoW offering Tokens ($20 for 150k gold) and RuneScape offering Bonds ($7 for 4 million GP).
  • calledacheater 7y ago
    I dabbled in selling scripts for Wow, D3, RS, NeoPets way way back, even wall hacks and auto-aim bits for FPS games... Wow was the best in my opinion - it was fun waking every morning with an ungodly amount of loot, felt like Christmas. It led to a passion for process automation, both hardware and software. The one thing I could never overcome were the people in my surroundings - family, school, work ... they all said I was a cheat and if I cheat at video games what else wouldn’t I cheat at, why stop there. I haven’t noticed one comment regarding the ethics or morality of process automation for video games even though almost all games ban it under TOS. Would be fun to have a game encourage scripting.
  • fuxufu 7y ago
    Could be my then neighbor. Started while in school and made around that sum with Glider. Went to study engineering (nothing IT) and then tried to focus on his health and reduced the wow sidejob.
• rczhang 7y ago
  Holy shit! This is literally my story too. Playing runescape and writing scripts for botting programs was literally how I learned to program. I ended up becoming a moderator on the RsBot forums and I remember Autofighter Pro when it came out. Super popular, and I didn't even realize it was made by someone the same age as me back then! Anyways, even though I didn't make any money (I gave my scripts away for free!), I did learn a lot. I'm currently an engineer at Google and I honestly owe it to the incredible monotony of playing Runescape.
  • methyl 7y ago
    Exactly the same story here. When I was 12 or 13 I tried to use bots in Tibia to make some money on selling gold, eventually leading me to the path of trying to write my own bots for different games. I had one of the first proof of concept bot for Path of Exile which I reverse engineered myself. I think it's really a great way to get into programming, since it's SUPER rewarding to make the computer game work for you especially if you can sell some of this work afterwards. I know for some people it can be viewed as a shady practice, but I regret nothing ;)
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
      Tibia bot developer checking in as well. Started in 8th grade with Open Tibia and have been at it since.
• tjbiddle 7y ago
  The Runescape "blackmarket" was a fun world to play in! Like the author, I got into creating Runescape bots for a bit - but never works to sell them, just made my own for fun and (in-game) profit. As I dove deeper into the world, I came across people who would purchase a monthly VPS and install botting software on it. There were plenty of guides on how to go through - but no easy solutions for those who weren't technical. Realizing I had an opportunity to capitalize on this - I built up a hosting company dedicated to the Runescape botting niche. Each VPS would come pre-installed with all the required software and make it dead simple to begin botting within 5 minutes or so. At my peak, I think I had over 100 dedicated servers each running anywhere from 4-16 VPS on them. Some of my customers were using it to level up their personal accounts, others were running gold-farming operations. The business was fairly passive, and I learned a ton from the experience. Things eventually came crumbling down when the creators of Runescape broke the bots (This would happen on occasion, but things would be up and running within a day or two normally) for a long time. I had to shut down as all my customers left overnight.
  • gjs278 7y ago
    how did they break the bots? I made a very basic runescape autoclicker at https://www.garyshood.com/rsclient/ https://www.garyshood.com/rsclient/ I wonder if it gets banned in game now.
    • lmpostor 7y ago
      That's you? Well first of all, thanks! But I think your auto-typer was really one of the only "allowed" 3rd party programs, and auto-clicking was never really enforced strictly. When the bots got advanced, they pretty much had two methods via either injection or emulation of the entire game. So either they broke them through making a bunch of fundamental changes of ingame systems or the ability to connect to the servers.
    • silverfox17 7y ago
      They do it through various methods.. original common ones were random events, sleeping bags, slight screen rotations every so often, changing the ways you could interface programmatically with the game, changing colors slightly, etc.
• xxkylexx 7y ago
  Hey Rodney. Nice to see you on HN. - You know who :)
  • rodneyg_ 7y ago
    Hey Kyle!!! It's been awhile. ;)
• dzhiurgis 7y ago
  I don’t know why, but cheating in Runescape is hardest drug ever. I’ve got banned in 2005, never touched gaming after that. Anyone remember SCAR?
  • robertely 7y ago
    SCAR was I think the first programming I did. It was very good software, really made it enjoyable. So much so that SCAR eventually _became_ the game. Every morning before school and every afternoon when I got home I would check on my bot to see it either: - Murdering chickens/Mining/Cutting wood - Stuck on a tree - Stock on the log in screen I just remember how carefully i had to debug those scar scripts. A bug could waste night of botting, or worse do something suspicious and get your account locked. I worry that kids growing up today have fewer opportunities like this.
  • Chromozon 7y ago
    For those that don't know, SCAR is a scripting IDE. It was originally created for Runescape, but it can easily be used for many other games or automated tasks. Scripts are written in the Pascal programming language (super old school!). The IDE provides the ability to focus on windows, track screen coordinates, and get pixel color values. There is a large standard library of functions- MoveMouse(), ClickMouse(), FindBitmap(), FindColor(), TypeKeys('asdf')- basically all the building blocks necessary to emulate human input. There are probably better scripting IDEs out there nowadays, but back then, this was one of the best.
• GordonS 7y ago
  I also got into programming through game mods, but for me in started with making maps for Duke Nukem 3D (yes, of '96 vintage!), and then 3D modelling and QuakeC mods. A lot of people I collaborated with ended up working in the games industry, either on games like Unreal, or in journalism. I ended up working in the enterprise, but from the many bad stories of life in the games industry, perhaps it was a lucky escape :)
• willvarfar 7y ago
  Ah, its nice to reminicse! Back in my day, games weren't online, and I didn't really have the hardware to do them justice, nor the money to buy good hardware or games either. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D from a cover-disk in a tiny postage-stamp sized window. At school we used to pass around cover-disks because we couldn't all afford to buy every mag. Anyway, I kind of started programming from the get-go, and for a long time, programming _was_ my game. By the time I got to uni I found myself writing modding tools and editors for various games that my friends played or wanted to make mods for. By then I had somehow found myself in a 'rogue' part of a very big company. I was surrounded by contractors making £60/hour so I started my own contracting company and was soon making way more money than I've ever made since. Once I graduated I went into normal being-an-employee mode, and things have been getting financially worse ever since. So its interesting, scary and confusing to read this guy's account of how he dropped out of school and has set up a stream of companies to sell his small products. Interesting, obviously. Scary, because I fear that some young people are reading it and thinking "I don't need school! I can make money!". Its the same way I get all scared when my daughters tell me how much youtubers apparently make. And confusing, because I can't spot the value in any of the products and stuff he has created recently. I guess I really don't get this whole social online world?! Perhaps I went in entirely the wrong direction all those years ago when I went and got a normal job? Good luck to him! Not sure what advice I'd give to a young kid now, though. To be honest, I'm not very keen on being an employee. But would you tell a kid to drop out of school and try and get funding for an app they sell to colleges etc?
  • isostatic 7y ago
    Some people make it as you tubers. Some make it in professional sports, some make it in Hollywood. Most don’t. It’s nothing new.
  • BLKNSLVR 7y ago
    > Wolfenstein 3D from a cover-disk in a tiny postage-stamp sized window The only way to play on a 286 without game-breaking stuttering visuals. Oh how far we've come in such a (relatively) short time.
  • thaumasiotes 7y ago
• lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  A "teenager does X" post that is actually worth reading.
  • Izmaki 7y ago
    Including or excluding the 40% fluff that was added seemingly because the author wanted to tell a good story more than anything? :P
• tbtplayer 7y ago
  https://billionairetutor.blogspot.com/2019/06/easiest-profitable-project-without.html https://billionairetutor.blogspot.com/2019/06/easiest-profit...
• neeraga 7y ago
  How come a listing with full details available publically can never make it to top of Ycombinator but a medium article with gated content ranks on top?
  • dang 7y ago
    What do you mean by "a listing with full details available publically"? Can you give examples of articles you feel should make it to the top to HN but haven't? The answer to why this one is doing well is clear from the comments: a lot of readers found a lot to identify with in the article. That's the important thing, not what site it appears on.
• Slartie 7y ago
  Oh yeah, loved to read this! Gaming and especially moddable games are a great entry into programming. It wasn't exactly my entry, as I had programmed stuff before, but I learned a huge lot during my university time while writing a database site for World of Warcraft, which also had a distributed data collection mechanism by which hundreds of thousands of users could upload data gathered while playing the game to my site, where it would all be distilled into a database, of which a special, minified copy was then compiled and offered to be downloaded by the players right into the game, to be used while playing as a knowledge base. And alongside of that, people could query the database via a web frontend that used all the latest shit (it was 2007 or 2008, AJAX was a big deal back then, reactive layouts were in their infancy, but I had one, and I even wrote a 3D model viewer in the browser and something like Google Maps to view pre-rendered maps of the game world that looked like satellite images). That thing was 60k LOC Java (data processing and website), 30k LOC Lua (for the addon in the game), about 5k LOC ActionScript, some hundred lines of PHP and Bash scripts, and about 5-10k LOC of C++ for the native client to do data uploads and downloads. I eventually sold it for about 60k€ including maintenance, and maintained it as a side project for 7 years total (most of the time I was also actively playing WoW) and then it was abandoned because the site didn't catch on enough among the competition, and the game itself assimilated lots of the functionality provided by my in-game database (which was named MobMap and did catch on massively with the players, I counted at least 1.1 million installs over it's lifetime) so that successful service became redundant over time and was eventually discontinued as well. But that project brought me lots of experience. Different programming languages and runtime environments and contexts, operating a multi-server infrastructure all by myself, using the latest web tech before there were frameworks that did all the hard things for you, maintaining a codebase over a long period, reverse-engineering (to get some of the data out of the game you had to reverse the original game data file formats, and since they changed with every patch, that was a continued activity done by a very small community of people in obscure online wikis, to which I eventually started contributing), updating large numbers of client installs in a secure and reliable way, processing gigabytes of raw data per day into a concise database (I think it was about 50GB XML incoming per day and the final DB was 4GB MySQL - and it was pre-SSDs, so I had to work all in memory with that DB to get the insert and update speeds I needed), this project had it all, and I continue to draw from those lessons in my job today.
• mrunkel 7y ago
  I'm jealous. I made $700 for a two year project that started when I was 15. :) When the project started, my partner and I (that's right, the $700 was for both of us) thought that $700 was an enormous sum and that we were being very clever. (This was in 1984). After two years (18 months of which was after my partner left for college) I finally was able to bring the project over the finish line.
  • ryanmercer 7y ago
    > thought that $700 was an enormous sum and that we were being very clever. (This was in 1984) This made me laugh out loud, it reminds me of the prizes Atari would give software devs via Atari Program Exchange (APX) contests, some of which teens won, which would be a few hundred bucks (or sometimes more) of credit for hardware usually, plus royalties on sales of the software
• ensiferum 7y ago
  The perfect mix of dumb luck and foolishness. Bet he had no idea of the business opportunity that was arising. And to think that many people spend their lives trying to find a small niche and build businesses and fail each time.
• Crazyontap 7y ago
  Just for arguments sake if this was titled "How I made $200,000 gaming Hacker news" where it's the exact same story but instead of writing for RSbots he was writing bots for a site to game HN submissions and comments and manipulating HN rankings instead we would have a completely different reaction, regardless if it happened years ago. Just a thought to put things into perspective.
  • sean-duffy 7y ago
    Yeah, it's kind of concerning that an article about essentially black-hat behavior is earning so much praise in the comments. You have to remember that this kind of thing put a huge strain on Jagex when they had to (and still do) spend resources fighting against bots and gold sellers rather than development of the game. And in fact the difficulty of dealing with this problem led to the update which restricted free trade and did a great deal of damage to the game and the people who played it.
    • Tepix 7y ago
      Aren't the MMORPGs also at fault? By requiring a long, boring "grind", they are encouraging players to automate their gaming hours. After all, we play games to be entertained, not to repeat boring tasks. That's a good reason why this activity (writing bots) is not seen in a negative light even if it may cause problems for the company running the game and/or other players and the game economy.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • Unknoob 7y ago
        The repetitive tasks are the fun aspect for many people. If it isn't fun for you, you have two choices: Either quit the game and find something you actually like, or use bots and ruin the fun for other people that like the game.
        • 7y ago
• justsoamazing 7y ago
  It's eerie how similar my own introduction to programming and business matches the author's. I started playing Runescape in elementary school (I logged many thousands of hours on the game) and eventually started programming because I desperately needed to automate some aspects of the game (my parents restricted video games to weekends only, which made it extremely difficult to meet my in-game goals). After teaching myself Java, I moved onto Android development and built a mobile app development agency that I ran throughout high school and college. People tend not to consider the positive impacts of gaming, but I think there's something to be said for MMORPGs. Runescape has a complex economy, captivating story telling, and complex inter-player dynamics - in other words, a consequence-free playground that prepares kids for real life. When I first started playing the game, I remember spending many hours aimlessly walking around. It felt like I was an explorer of old; I'd come across something new every hour. That feeling persisted throughout the years as I unravelled new experience after new experience: learning to become a merchant, joining a clan, killing a challenging boss for the first time, and so on. Compared to the day-to-day boredom of middle school and high school, perhaps it is only natural that kids gravitate to these online worlds.
  • reustle 7y ago
    I would love to see a game like RuneScape but with a built in "script manager". It would be sandboxed from your machine for security, but promote building little scripts to help you play the game. It would be ideal in a non-pvp game where the points don't really matter (Like Minecraft)
    • sparso 7y ago
      Have a look at https://screeps.com/ https://screeps.com/
  • kriro 7y ago
    Games give you a nice domain to think about that you get very involved in. I think they are a very good starting point for business-oriented programmers. You are very invested in the "world" and stuff that doesn't work as you want is painful. If it's painful enough you solve the problem via programming. That's pretty much exactly how good and sustainable software business in the B2B world tend to start. As a HS student it's not very likely that you know much about the healthcare, legal or whatever domain but it is very likely that you "live" in some game domain. I think there's some potential in cultivating this spirit and moving on to real world problems. Maybe something as silly as "talk to your family, what jobs do people have, are there painpoints you can identify, how would you solve them". The good thing about games is that there's no bureaucracy involved and feedback loops are fast. It can be frustrating if you write an automation script that makes a task someone solves by doing manual steps (Excel entry etc.) easier and then not have it rolled out or having to wait half a year to get a report if it improved things etc.
• drejay 7y ago
  Should you need the services of a good hacker, talk to darkcracker@protonmail.com. dude is good.
• Zenst 7y ago
  You may want to address some of the comments upon your twitter app, if your going to promote it as an achievement. Though appreciate that it was last updated in 2014, so API's being as they are - change over time and would explain the aspect that it doesn't work now. But amazing stuff and self-taught is kinda how many get into coding. How I got into IT back in the 80's. The aspect of bailing out your parents, that is something to be extremely proud of and a life achievement anybody can respect.
• rkachowski 7y ago
  What I find the most impressive is that someone was able to get a serious career start from one of the "Teach Yourself X in 21 days" books. I'd always dismissed these as proto-clickbait without any meaningful content. Shows what I know
  • world32 7y ago
    That book was not his sole source of information.
• NKCSS 7y ago
  I love this, because I can relate to it a lot, my story is very similar. I started at age 12, with QBasic and VB6, writing Trojans because that was what fascinated me at the time. A few years later, when .NET was introduced, I moved over to VB.NET. At the time, I was playing a web-based game called "BootLeggers.us". When I got into an accident, my leg was messed up, and I couldn't move off of a couch for a few days (stairs were not possible), I was still young and alone @home for a week because my parents were on holiday. I laid on that couch for 3 days, playing BootLeggers on a laptop, with my arm on a side-table. The worst position ever. I did this nearly 3 days straight, and it was when I first got carpal tunnel. I couldn't do anything for quite a while because it felt like my arms were on fire all the time :-/ Some time passes, and I can use a computer again for a bit, without too much pain, but I was no longer able to play Bootleggers, since I could not stay on the PC for that lang due to my carpal tunnel. The game is basically a set of actions you can do every X time. I had written small 'timer' applications that warn you when your next action is available, and I thought: why not automate a bit more of the game, since I can't play it for the duration I want to myself, so I started creating an application to do so. I've spent about a year and created a bot that could do everything in the game. It used an embedded webbrowser that was fully automated, so it was not detectable. You could play the game yourself in the application, and if you'd stop, the app would take over and continue playing, that way you could do complex interactions with people yourself if you wanted, and add some non-obvious behaviour, making it harder to detect. At the time, I was able to run the bot for weeks on end; I had it set up to take around 3 hours of downtime each day to make sure it would be 'defendable' to have a lot of activity, still, my account would rank faster than any other on the platform. The game then introduced CAPCHAs to the game, and the bot would not be able to continue. So, I created my own OCR engine and got it working again. Over the time, I've written 3 complete new implementations of the OCR engine, each working better than the previous. It was amazing to do and I learned a lot from it. Had a whole crew who I shared my programs with, had it locked down on your CPU serialnumber, HDD serialnumber and mac address to prevent it spreading to people who were not 'authorised', etc. It was definetively the thing that really made me more in love than ever with programming, the sheer power you wield and adoration you get from people you share your stuff with was amazing. Only thing that came close to this, was when I created the first online rainbowtable lookup serivce for hacking Tompson modems (got me on national tv news for a feature peace years later as well. It's dutch but you can watch it here if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfCEe9MuZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfCEe9MuZg ). Been writing software ever since I was 12, and still love it now. I started my own company finally two months ago after being the CTO of a startup for a year, and I'm so happy I did it, because I feel like, now I might get some time to get into some crazy project again :) I have so much more to tell, but I think I'll take some more time later on and just write a big blogpost, but it was fun to relive some of that history again :)
• world32 7y ago
  A key take-away from this is that the author learned to code because he had a real incentive to do so - in order to create bots to get better at runescape and make lots of money as a side-effect of that. He quickly saw how knowing how to code gave him abilities that his peers didn't have. Now imagine if he tried to learn java by attending a class for it - i.e. sitting there for an hour listening to some guy explain how a for loop works. Chances are he would be bored silly and never get anywhere with coding. I think its important for people learning how to code to have a genuine motivation behind it - have something you actually WANT to build. Don't just learn it so you can get a job.
  • astura 7y ago
    This is a really, really ignorant comment. I learned to code in the classroom with no other motivation besides paid employment and wasn't "bored silly." I've made a very successful career for myself in the many years since. Programmers are not different from other professions no matter how special you may feel.
    • world32 7y ago
      Hence why I said "Chances are" - meaning "there is a high probably that".
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • ajiang 7y ago
      There is absolutely a better way you could have phrased this. In fact, the easiest is to entirely remove your first sentence. You could make a counter-point, stating that not everyone is driven by external motivation, providing yourself as an anecdotal example. Instead you provided an insult and then gave anecdotal evidence.
    • world32 7y ago
      > Programmers are not different from other professions no matter how special you may feel. I find it odd how offended you seem by my post. I don't think that programmers are any different from other professions in this sense. But the subject of this thread is about programming which is why I commented about that. It is just like other STEM subjects in that - a lot of people study them at university, but only a few people actually go on to work in the field they studied. Some studies find that only around 25% of STEM graduates actually go on to work in the field they studied. http://shortsleeveandtieclub.com/what-percentage-of-engineering-graduates-actually-work-in-their-respective-fields/ http://shortsleeveandtieclub.com/what-percentage-of-engineer...
• orian 7y ago
  I've learned tree searching and tree pruning when trying to write a bot finding the optimal way to play OGame (was about 14-15y old). Never really manage to write the full bot, didn't know English well enough and the resources in my language were poor ;-(
• jokoon 7y ago
  So... made money to cheat the game? How is that a great story?
• maribozu 7y ago
  Apologies for not really related question - is there a way to bypass Medium "login wall"? That's probably the third time this week I see "sign up for extra free reading". No any intention to sign up to Medium tbh.
  • pzagor2 7y ago
    Open the URL in an incognito tab.
  • pragmaticlurker 7y ago
    anonymous browsing
  • bigzyg33k 7y ago
    Further to the comments below, you can also just delete the sites cookies, assuming that you're not logged in
• nickjj 7y ago
  I love reading stories like this. Gaming is also one of the main things that got me into web development and programming too. One of my first real projects beyond a Geocities personal site was a gaming ladder in 2000ish that a friend coded and I designed. It was basically a SAAS app for people to schedule, report and rank competitive Quake 3 matches. That project alone helped kick off a career in freelancing and I haven't stopped in nearly 20 years.
• alfonsodev 7y ago
  this story checks the "solve your own problem/scratch your own itch" advice for entrepreneurs/makers, you can tell it must be very satisfactory, it is motivating to read such stories.
• tnr23 7y ago
  for me it was similar but with the game Tibia
• black_13 7y ago
  How I made minimum when I was 16 and I was underpaid. Cherypicking story.
• lowracle 7y ago
  When I was a kid, I learned so much about programming by doing those kinds of "illegal" activities. When you are young you are reckless, adventurous, you want to cheat the system. My first introduction to programming was through a bot for a MMORPG too, which was used to harvest resources. I then started to build bot for mini games where you could win prizes if you had the highest score, and resold those prizes on second hand markets. I also learned about "hacking" because it felt cool and underground. I believe kids should be protected from the heavy legal repercussion you could have by doing those things, as long as the intent was curiosity and a lack of awareness of laws. Every thing is getting more protected/regulated and it has become so easy to ruin your parents life if you are a little bit too curious. I don't really know what the solution is, but I hope my kids will be able to experience like I did !
• indigodaddy 7y ago
  There are MacBook images strewn about the article, which definitely fits with hip coder culture, but I doubt he started coding in the Mac ecosystem, given how he started out in gaming? More likely he started coding in Windows.... if so, then all the MAC art in the article is slightly curious to me. Totally fine (I am currently a Mac user, and I’m sure the author is now as well) of course.
• redleggedfrog 7y ago
  I like reading all the posts where people are like, "Hey, that's my story, too!" Uplifting thread. It most certainly takes motivation (I say passion) to become a self-taught programmer. I think the "larval stage" (http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/larval-stage http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/larval-stage) is critical. That transformation makes you a different kind of programmer. I am also a self-taught programmer, but I came at it from a different angle, long before this internet age. I wasn't hacking on games (although I did do that sometimes). I was hacking the machine (PC-XT!) and the OS and software that ran on it. I was fascinated. I went from command-line, to scripting, to Microsoft C, and then it took off from there, and I've been at it professionally uninterrupted since 1990. I didn't go back to school for CS, though. I wish I did, and am happy to see other people here have. I think that's important. I had to teach myself all the best practices (thank goodness for "Code Complete") or learn them on the job. This probably isn't 100% kosher, but this kind of story is a good indicator when hiring. If you ask how someone got their start and it's this kind of self-motivated journey they invariably make good employees. Over the years we've most certainly noticed there is a significant difference in value between someone who chose programming because it's a job and someone where programming chose them.
• DEDLINE 7y ago
  Reading this article + accompanying comments has me reminiscing on how awesome the Runescape community was back in the day. Scripting for SCAR, Moderating on Sythe.org (screen name Puto & Heist if anyone's out there) and trafficking massive amounts of internet goods via PayPal bring back some of my fondest memories on the internet. I credit a good portion of my career success today to Runescape-centric experiences in CS, Business and Community Politics. Thank you Andrew Gower + JaGeX team for creating a game much larger than itself.
  • Topgamer7 7y ago
    Runescape was great for anyone with parents who wouldn't let you install things. All you needed was a browser and java, super low bar for entry into the world of grinding.
• wyldfire 7y ago
  I'm assuming that these bots impact other gamers -- either through some negative consequence for human gamers or overall inflation of the MMO marketplace. If that's the case, then these bots seem terribly antisocial. OTOH it seems like youthful mischief is a rite of passage for software developers. Regardless of how you started: good for you, and good luck with your career!
  • folkrav 7y ago
    As much as I despise them, they basically are to be expected in any MMO these days. There isn't much to be done against them. These big third-party marketplaces using hundreds of bot accounts don't really care about getting banned - as long as they make enough sales, they can just buy new accounts ad vitam aeternam. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more shady ones used stolen accounts.
• contrahax 7y ago
  I also got started programming writing RS bots, private servers, cheat clients, and eventually reverse engineering the game client (and sometimes other people's scripts) to write bot frameworks. I remember talking smack to the article author in the private RSBots script authors forums as a 13 year old and getting banned a few times. Good memories of a great community, with lots of people who ended up in solid careers doing impressive engineering work. Every so often I get a DM from somebody who wants to meet up IRL to grab a coffee almost 15yrs later. If anyone reading this remembers Bomb/Contra/RFTO/RECoders hit me up!
• Adamantcheese 7y ago
  I made an actual robot to automate hi alching for me a year or two ago, to work around the whole "no software" thing. It just pressed the mouse button for over a month every ~0.6 seconds. Totally worth it. Just had to check on it every 24 hours when the client timed itself out.
• wyclif 7y ago
  A couple of quick questions I wanted to ask the author (if he sees this): How did you manage to hide the money from your family and friends when you were still keeping your programming secret, before you told your parents? Did you have any problems getting certain bank accounts or cards because of age restrictions?
• Myrmornis 7y ago
  This is a great story. In my experience this sort of gaming-based route to programming expertise is not uncommon among programmers, and I suspect that it is a contributing factor to the gender imbalance. Scanning the quite large thread, I’m curious whether anyone is actually non-male at all.