As the original Author of Axe, that's an extremely inspiring story. I also, as you can guess, first got into programming on my trusty TI-83+ when I started hig

As the original Author of Axe, that's an extremely inspiring story. I also, as you can guess, first got into programming on my trusty TI-83+ when I started high school. Without really knowing the TI-BASIC language and lacking the link cable, I remember some time when I was in the library typing a Mandelbrot set program line for line from the computer, trying to figure out where all those random tokens were located. Once I finally got that working, I was hooked and started making all sort of different programs. Some of the early programs I remember creating were mostly math programs and algorithms I learned from classes. But very soon I started getting into gaming. I had always wanted to make really cool games, but I always ended up limited by the capabilities of the calculator, and ended up mostly producing puzzle games; Minesweeper, Sudoku, Skyscrapers, etc. I also managed to make a text adventure and an 'AI' chat bot. I wondered how people were able to make some of the more advanced games and eventually stumbled upon assembly. It took me a really long time to grasp all the concepts and it was very frustrating. Every instruction has a bunch of side effects, you have to remember what every register is holding at every point in time, and you have to memorize all the mnemonics. I was also annoyed that I couldn't program it on the go (Mimas didn't exist at the time) but that certainly didn't stop me! With nothing better to do during that bus ride to and from school, I actually printed out all the op-codes, ram locations, bcalls, ascii tables, token tables, and would literally type in the hexadecimal into the calculator to program! It was insane and really dangerous, constantly deleting the memory every time I typed a wrong character or forgot about the endianess. I eventually just gave up on that and stuck with programming assembly games on the computer in my free time. By the time I learned enough assembly to produce my first full game, a PacMan clone, it was around the end of high school and it was then that I decided that I really wanted to make it easier for people like myself to be able to make actually good games on the go. It wasn't until a year later that I started creating Axe Parser for that purpose. Although I didn't have any formal experience with compilers, languages, or other relevant theory I started anyway, just doing what I figured would work best. It actually managed to succeed and after only a month of work, I was able to program a full game in about an hour! It was exactly what I wished had existed when I was in school, and it's super exciting to see there are students out there now that actually have this power and are making awesome stuff! Its even more thrilling when it influences people to get into coding more seriously. Warms my heart every time I see things like this :) As for me now, I haven't touched z80 programming for a few years now. I'm working at an amazing start-up where I get to combine programming and mathematics to do some really interesting things.