I'm Christian and I'm a passionate software developer from germany. βοΈ
I've always been curious and wanted to understand how the world around me works ...
When I was around 10, I got my first computer and spent a lot of my free time playing computer games, initially just single player or LAN games with friends. But eventually I stumbled upon MMOs and had my first experiences with hackers. Instead of getting frustrated about not being able to compete against these players, I asked myself "How the hell do they do it?".
In answering this question, I gained my first experiences with C++ and .NET languages.
At that time, the only programming achievement I made was getting the different code snippets I found on the internet, and barely understood, to work together.
However, the resulting Frankenstein applications worked surprisingly well. I developed the code that manipulated the game's memory in C++ and used VB.NET and Windows Forms to create the GUIs to operate it.
Eventually, I came across C# and the opportunity to manipulate memory directly with it, which allowed me to develop applications completely in a single language.
At some point, I also learned about Lua and was fascinated by the fact that I could easily incorporate the language into my applications. This resulted in some tools for automating tasks in games - I implemented the actual reading and manipulation of the game state in C#, and made sure that I could access these functions within small Lua scripts.
At that time, I became aware of SecondLife and was impressed by the fact that you could create your own virtual world. It didn't take long for me to learn LSL (an imperative scripting language developed by Linden Lab for controlling objects in the virtual 3D world Second Life) and started messing around with it, as well as making in-game money by creating scripts for others.
This led me to web development - you can display websites within the game, which was something I really wanted to be able to do. This is also where one of my first larger projects emerged, which is still waiting to be completed. Since LSL is quite rudimentary and lacks features like OOP, I wanted to develop an IDE & compiler that would allow me to use such features. I wanted to do this with PHP and JS. The IDE should run completely in the browser and be compatible with the in-game web browser. Since there was no way to create and execute scripts with scripts (something I wanted in order to simply click a button in the IDE to try out a script), I got distracted by the idea of somehow realizing it and started developing prototypes for an interpreter in PHP that sent HTTP commands to a "runtime" script within the game world and executed in-game functions.
To be continued ...