Remember that time you wrote your first ever Hello World program? Funny enough, I can't actually remember, for it has been so long. Oh wait. You don't know who I am? I am Valphalia Hoopes, and this is my journey with coding.

So where do we begin?

Ever since I found out what a computer was, I wanted to know more about these amazing machines that can do almost everything under the sun. I was obsessed with the game Minecraft, especially mods, and wondered how these people created such drastic differences with the vanilla game. One day, around 3rd grade, I saw a book that included two type-out BASIC programs in the school library. This was around 2013, so BASIC was way out of date. One of the programs counted to a million, and the other was a game of NIM. Seeing these programs, I immediately tried to type them into a Word document. You can imagine how well it went.

After I left 5th grade, I entered a STEM science camp at the local university. To my 10-year-old self's dismay, it was not about computers, but rather about space, more specifically the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012. I remember I raised my hand to ask, "How do I learn to code?". The instructor replied that I should start with MIT's Scratch. Initially, I dismissed it as "fake coding", due to it being visual scripting. But then, in one of the classes at the camp, I actually got to program a small SparkFun rover. By that point, I didn't have experience with proper text programming. The only programming experience I had was making some games on an iPad app called Hopscotch. This, combined with the fact that the camp was highly stressful for my autistic brain (I should probably mention that I have autism), made it so that I could barely make the rover go forward.

In early middle school, I returned to Scratch, thinking "This might be good for me", and proceeded to write a million and one small projects. One of those was a Terraria-style boss fight against the "Ember Dog", which was supposed to be the first game in a series. That never happened. At around this point, I went back to looking at text programming languages like Python. Since I only had an iPad to code on, I had to write programs in an app called Pythonista that was actually quite powerful.

During 8th grade (or was it 7th?), I created my biggest project up to that point, EconoMew. It was a simple text based business simulation game themed around cats. You could sell products, advertise, take out loans (even though I didn't know how loans worked back then), etc. EconoMew was programmed in the aforementioned Pythonista on the iPad.

High school was not the best time for my coding career. Coming from middle school, which was highly stressful (I was hospitalized for suicidal thoughts in 7th grade), I didn't know what to do. Even though my school was an early college, it had one programming class in which I knew all the material already. Although I still wanted to continue with programming, I put it down for the next 3 years.

Then here comes 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic made the world go into lockdown and reconsider what was necessary. Junior year was the worst school year of my life in terms of academics. I went from making the dean's list to barely getting by. I had to reconsider everything. That's when I picked up programming again.

Normally, my hobbies go through phases of a week of full interest, then up to a year of no interest. I couldn't stay committed to anything. But during senior year of high school, I remembered a thing called Hack Reactor. I remember it had a brutal applications process, but was one of the best coding bootcamps in the country. I thought, "Maybe this is the key to breaking the cycle!". But back then, I was under 18, so I couldn't apply.

As soon as my 18th birthday rolled around, I applied to Hack Reactor and managed to worm my way in. The deadline for applying to the September cohort was 3 days after my birthday, meaning I had to blaze through the pre-curriculum as fast as possible. This brings me to today, where I have started the bootcamp proper. As for what's next, I intend to complete the camp and get a job at a local tech company called Bluestaq.

My life has had a series of ups and downs, but most importantly, it has been accompanied by the humble computer. From the early days of looking at Minecraft mods to a bright future ahead of me, my coding journey has taken me far.

If you are still reading, thank you for your time.