I don’t even know where to begin with this.
I genuinely don’t even know who I’d BE without MakeCode. It has altered my life so fundamentally that trying to explain it in a couple of sentences feels almost impossible…
help
how do I start thiss
Ok… uhm
so… like, I wasn’t even originally a “coding kid”.
When I was younger, I was actually obsessed with astronomy. That was “the thing” in my life. I wanted to be an astronomer. I’d read mostly about Carl Sagan, look up exoplanets, learn their names, find out what their atmospheres were made of, go down increasingly ridiculous rabbit holes about space, and I was pretty convinced that was going to be my future. I absolutely loved it.
Then, in my 2nd Year of secondary school in 2021 we did a coding workshop where we used MakeCode Arcade.
And it wasn’t really that cliché “I used MakeCode once and immediately knew I wanted to be a programmer” thing, even thought that’s TOTALLY valid if that happened with anyone, but that isn’t actually what happened to me.
I wasn’t instantly hooked. It was just… fun. I made something, and then I wanted to mess with it and see where that went. Then I’d want to add something and see if I could make something else happen. And I think that was the thing that slowly got me.
Because eventually I realised that you can make pretty much anything, and I mean that almost literally.
You open that little editor and there’s no real ceiling on what you can try to do. Obviously there are technical limitations, and there are things you won’t know how to make yet, but the actual idea that I could just… make something that didn’t exist before was completely insane to me.
There were no asterisks to it really.
No “well, you can make anything if you already know how to code.”
No “you can make anything if you’re a professional programmer.”
I was a kid sitting in a classroom with MakeCode Arcade, and I could make a game.
So I kept going.
I started with that first little game from the workshop. Eventually I finished it, which ended up being my very first game called Skeleton Scramble and then immediately, like INSTANTANEOUSLY thought, “okay, but what if I made an RPG out of this?”
That became Dark vs. Light, my first proper game series. I spent roughly a year messing with it, learning as I went, constantly finding something else I wanted to add.
And somewhere during that process, I logically got completely hooked, started making more games, and then more, then I joined the MakeCode forums, started entering game jams, started meeting people all of that. And then I started learning JavaScript and TypeScript and HTML and CSS because I wanted to do more things with the stuff I was making.
Then I started making websites, making bigger and more ridiculous projects.
And very slowly at some point MakeCode had gone from being “this cool coding thing I did at school during class” to basically being the foundation of almost everything I was interested in.
I ended up making games for my hospital school, worked on the TMF series, and of course, I got to actually work as part of a development team with Luke and InvalidProject on TMF3, which is still probably my favourite project I’ve ever released so far.
I’ve made games that took months to finish. I’ve won game jams. I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time experimenting with things that absolutely did not need to be experimented with.
And somewhere along the way, things just changed… I was kinda just like oh.
I want to do this for the rest of my life.
So I’m now studying Computer Science and Software Engineering at university.
And I am genuinely, completely serious when I say that I am doing that because of MakeCode Arcade.
I genuinely mean that if that one coding workshop had never happened, I would not have the behemoth of a career plan I have now.
My entire interest in Computer Science, which I intend to be my future career, was forged from that one little introduction to MakeCode Arcade. Really let that sink in.
And I’m actually going into university already knowing things I learned entirely because I wanted to make more stuff in MakeCode. I’ve taught myself (from earlier) JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, CSS, some Java, a bit of C++, some game development concepts, and a ridiculous amount of other things that I originally had absolutely no reason or interest in learning.
So yeah, uh… don’t wanna make this too long…
Happy 10 years, MakeCode.
You kind of changed my entire life.