
Ask HN: What's the first “thing” you ever made? - Kevin_S
Not necessarily a product, but even as just a child.
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malux85
The first thing I remember is writing a space invaders clone in BASIC on a a
386 25MHz with 4mb of RAM.

It was challenging without internet access, I invented things like the game
loop, and tried to compartmentalise the enemy code vs input code, First
version cleared and redrew the screen every frame, then I learnt about
blacking out the characters and only drawing the essentials (it was all ASCII
based I didn't know how to draw graphics)

Looking back on it, I can see there's a bunch of polling where there should be
events, the game loop is full of input code, and lots of global state and
gotos

But I was pretty young at the time, about 8 or so - it was the first proper
development project I made and the first time I thought "hey, this software
stuff is complex!!"

I fondly remember spending hours trying to hold the program state in my head,
being so inexperienced at programming I was oscillating between getting
distracted by implementation details or thinking too abstract to be useful - I
practiced shifting up and down the abstraction layers to try and hold all this
complexity (not knowing terminology or really understanding what I was doing)
so challenging and fun!

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codegeek
As a kid, I used to make tons of little things that a lot of kids do. But I
had special interest in arts and crafts which got me to build a few cool
things. I remember crafting a peacock on a canvas using wood ice cream spoons
and toothpicks.

As an adult: A web based Basketball scorecard in plain HTML/CSS/JS. Was in
college at the time and it came as a side project through a contact. Was
really fun in the beginning but it was my first taste of how real world works
when the client started calling me day and night to make tweaks and fixes :).
No regrets though.

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BjoernKW
A small C64 BASIC program for keeping tennis match scores and generating a
ranking from those. I must have been about 9 years old at the time.

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meric
A game made using MS PowerPoint on Mac. I can't remember if it's Mac OS 8.6 or
OS X.

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alttab
A web page about Worms 2 hosted on Tripod.

