hacking, gamedev and chaos. story so far
The story of how I got into computers is one that has been asked of me quite a bit. I do think that my actions and things I've stumbled upon might be useful or inspirational for aspiring computer nerds. Hence, I write these for those.
I happened to get a raspberry Pi 3 when I was in 6th grade, after getting inspired by YouTube videos on building robots and smart devices. As a solo kid with a knack for DIY, I figured out how to set it up and play around with it by reading the tutorials on the website. I also got a sensor kit, and did some things with GPIO pins using Scratch and Python. This was also when I figured out how bash shell, and more importantly how SSH worked.
In school, all of our systems were Ubuntu, and for ease of administration, all of them had the same password. In my age of poor judgement and as an agent of chaos, I played around with logging into my friends computers and plaguing them with notify-sends and gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri file:///you-are-hacked.jpg . Around this time, our school's were being upgraded from black boards to projectors and laptops in every classroom. Most teachers were inexperienced for working with computers when this happened, and my little edge of computing knowledge got me to be the guy who got called for tech support.
By 8th grade, I had progressed into an advanced script kiddie of sorts. One of my greatest feats back then was figuring out how .m3u8 streams works, as I hated seeing the ads on those free movie sites. ffmpeg was one of my most cherished programs at the time. It was around this time that I also started by Blender phase, and I made 2 animated short videos to show for it as well. I made my first github repo about a blender render manager for overnight rendering, as I owned a Pentium 4GB laptop which I abused to render scenes in Cycles.
During COVID, I had reached a limit on my gamedev skills with Scratch, and took up Godot as my next level of progression. I had developed a preference for this FOSS ideology by then. I did start multiple game projects of only which Pixel Shooter was exported as a mobile app. I did have concept art and a prototype for a game called Frakus but never ended up getting the alpha made. Discord was starting become a thing, and some of my PC gaming friends were there. I built discord bots for them, had some discord mod politics, nuked some servers because the chaos hadn't left me yte. tbh I genuinly did waste a lot of my COVID time, it all just still seems like a blur now.
Towards the end though, I started watching Mental Outlaw and some other youtuber's foray into darkweb cryptocurrency and more, and did dabble a little with that. I was still afraid of torrents due the IP leak risk, and wanted to see what exactly was happening in the underbelly of the internet. I familiarized my self with setting up onion sites and hidden IRC servers. I also started my youtube channel at around that time. I also had an i2p node running for a while on my RPi which was fun.
In 10th, I got access to the free 1 year EC2 instance, which I used to build a Strava API backed activity analyzer for a cycling club (I was a cyclist who went for MTB and Road races). They've then further developed that into a proper analysis tool that they use to this day. I also installed Arch Linux and had ascended to the upper echelons of Linux users. I did do a lot of things around then, half of which couldn't be mentioned here.
Then came higher secondary for which I was mostly dormant due to obvious reasons. I did start a little bit web dev, by watching Fireship and some others. I also had my first fully techy friend group by then, and did some shenanigans with them. C++ and competitive programming came into my life around that time as well, and I did participate in some of those Olympiads. A bit of formal CS education did help me a bit as I choose CS as my course. For JEE mains results, I helped my friend write a program to automatically check our scores from the JEE mains keys and our answers, which became a widely used tool at the time. That almost wraps up my activities in that time.
Then college started. I'll discuss my exploits there in an another log perhaps.