I had a very similar experience. Writing the HTML to spruce up the homepage of my Neopets guild was my first introduction to any website creation or programming.
Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).
Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
I hung out with the neopets kids in school who were doing html stuff. I never really got into neopets myself but some of them were really into geocities which I totally clicked with. Some of my friends were artsy so I made pages for webcomics and CYOA games (with hand drawn graphics to accompany). Those friends ended up getting careers in the arts while I ended up as a computer/electrical engineer.
I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!
Serious question though, from a purely data analytical question - are you an incredible programmer? Like legit. Please tell me you're a badass. You gotta be? Real talk, rate yourself. I demand it.
Similar story to me. I was big into games and game design as a kid and was already doing some light modding of games but only a little programming. I experimented with using a memory editor to cheat on the Flash games in 6th grade, which promptly led to my account being banned. I was devastated and wanted revenge and swore I would write my own, sophisticated autobuyer bot. By mid 7th grade, I finished my project. I wrote it in REALBasic (was on a Mac). I implemented a barebones HTTP socket and cookie jar on top of the raw TCP socket provided by the language and learned to do all of that by sniffing my own network traffic and reading parts of the RFCs. I wrote rudimentary String parsing functions to parse the HTML results since I don't know Regex, and I also defeated the shop CAPTCHAs using a novel approach I have never seen anyone else use to this day. My bot worked phenomenally.
Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.
Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.
this is how i got my start in programming, eventually leading to working in finance and now in gamedev for a AAA. many of the programmers i worked with as a teenager to build neopets automations are in similar places. i have so many stories and even met my ex wife of ten years through the community!
oh and i regret all the duping glitches i found and exposed and stuff im sorry
This is exactly how I got my start. Neocodex was the forum where I learned how to program, and slicing up images in CS2 to show up on a Tripod site was how I learned web development.
Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you could sell your omelettes.
That very well might be true for some of my family members, I'll have to ask. Perhaps not in terms of a career, but certainly in terms of computer literacy.
For me, it was the game Starseige:Tribes (1998), which had a (comparatively) phenomenal client-side scripting scene. I could learn the magic incantation, and now the HUD has a new box with a timer in it, or my character "speaks" new phrases--not intended by the designers--by interrupting existing canned phrases at the right times, etc.
There's something magical when skill-learning happens really close to a personal payoff from it.
Love this, I learned to code via a combination of neopets and MySpace. I made tiny animations in bootlegged versions of flash and then imported them as iframes, it was such a fun way to be creative and build stuff online
I also credit Neopets, but it was really the confluence of Neopets, MySpace, Geocities/Tripod, Xanga, etc. that really formed the base for so much of my career.
I never played this but I definitely got my start through a similar kind of tinkering. I'm glad I grew up in that era before so much interaction with technology started to be done on mobile or other locked down devices. And before "tinkering" would be reduced to rephrasing prompts.
It’s really funny seeing everybody here talk about how Neopets taught them HTML/introduced them to coding, and all I can think about was how it taught me about “immersive advertising”!
I know people are attracted to the code aspect ("it's how I learned html") and that's great but it's also a fabulous world (says I, an absolute noob and not good at any of it) and fairly hard to boot, in its difficulty curve
I like this idea of old internet things coming back to life (thank you Ruffle)
23 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 46.0 ms ] threadThen one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
put it aside for years and eventually became a programmer later in life
My hacks were shit before I had hair on my balls, you know? But I tried. VBasic....when Microsoft didn't suck. XP 4 LYFE...ride or die
Wanna be in my guild bro?
Best, Prototype #52ASB_ADS_ALPHA_A+
Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.
Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.
oh and i regret all the duping glitches i found and exposed and stuff im sorry
For me, it was the game Starseige:Tribes (1998), which had a (comparatively) phenomenal client-side scripting scene. I could learn the magic incantation, and now the HUD has a new box with a timer in it, or my character "speaks" new phrases--not intended by the designers--by interrupting existing canned phrases at the right times, etc.
There's something magical when skill-learning happens really close to a personal payoff from it.
I like this idea of old internet things coming back to life (thank you Ruffle)