My first experience of programming was with Scratch, a simplified block language designed to teach beginners the fundamentals of coding. This taught me about the basics of sequential programming, conditional branching and iteration, as well as a basic introduction to data types. I used Scratch for quite a long time, making some relatively complex projects, but while it is very easy to make sprites move across the screen, doing anything useful with variables, lists or functions was more complicated than it should be.

In 2015, I went on a 5-day course to learn how to use the Roblox Studio game engine. This makes it easy to create meshes and handles physics and server management for you, making it straight forward to create a basic game with little coding. Although slow at first, I did gradually start to learn to use Lua scripts to add more complex functionality. However, questionable business practices from Roblox have left me with a sense of hopelessness using the game engine, and I have mostly moved on from this now.

In 2018 I joined secondary school, and began having regular computer science lessons every 2 weeks. In year 7, we spent a short while using C# to make simple text-based programs, though I did not learn enough to make anything more than this.

In 2020 and 2021 amongst the COVID lockdowns we learned how to use p5js, a JavaScript library similar to the HTML canvas 2d context, which allowed us to draw shapes and make flags. With all my free time, I was inspired by a YouTube channel called The Coding Train (who was also using p5js) to use JavaScript to make more intelligent and interesting programs. I was particularly inspired by his Minesweeper Video and tried to make a version of my own, but with a poor understanding of prototypes and classes, it was not succesful.

At the end of 2021, I started the GCSE course, and we would be learning Python for use in the exam. I gradually worked through exercises on CSNewbs when not learning new content.

Nearer the end of the course, our teaching was disrupted, and we had many lessons where we were left to get on with individual coding. My friend Holly decided to work on making an online chatroom with a p5js HTML client and a Node js server, and this inspired me to try making minesweeper again. This time I would use try using classes to represent the tiles. The code had lots of faults and inconsistencies, but it did eventually yield a working game! It was also during this time that I had the idea of a procedurally generated board, to enable the game to expand infinitely.

Upon arrival to CMS, I was already quite well acquainted with JavaScript, but I had not learned about its context in the web environment, having mainly been running it through a repl. Learning HTML has been incredibly useful to make websites and enable JavaScript to be run in the browser as it is designed to. I have learned a lot about OOP, persistent storage and client/server applications, and look forward to enhancing my knowledge of JavaScript and web development further in the future.