
How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018) - rodneyg_
https://medium.com/tech-product-and-life/how-i-made-200-000-when-i-was-16-years-old-304f0e87cfb6
======
rococode
Games with strong user-hosted server ecosystems seem to be a great way for
kids to start gaining serious coding experience. I went a similar path with
Minecraft servers (and also first started with Runescape, both are in Java) -
making a server in highschool and grossing ~$150k in a year and a half.

Before making a server, I thought coding was cool, but had never done much
beyond running some basic programs. Making a server gave me clear goals that
helped me learn coding much faster. "I need to figure out how to add custom
bosses so my server will be more fun!" is _much_ more fun and interesting to a
teenager than "I need to figure out how to remove a Car object from this list
of Car objects". There's also the very important social aspect - seeing other
real people enjoy code you wrote is extremely satisfying.

And you can do really cool stuff with servers that teaches you real things,
moreso than any class could. My own experience writing a ton of custom code
for my Minecraft server taught me things like Unix, Redis, MySQL, web dev,
reading obfuscated code, networking (like running 8 servers and writing code
to pass players from one to another), deployment, basic security, pathfinding
algorithms, writing scripting engines, etc. etc. all of which I had no
experience with before, and would not have learned for several years
otherwise. I'm graduating with my master's in CS now and still haven't been
taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted
to make. The few other devs of big servers that I knew had similar experiences
- started off as beginner programmers, and gained a huge amount of experience
from building out a passion project.

~~~
connor4312
A similar story here. I was into the game and started running a Minecraft
server hosting company in high school (selling VPS'es with a Minecraft control
panel, effectively). I ended up learning and doing the operations,
maintenance, support, marketing, taxes--the usual jack-of-all trades of being
a startup. My connections and experience there led directly to me joining
another company, which has subsequently been acquired and landed me at
Microsoft.

I wish more CS/programming classes, particularly pre-college, were game-
oriented. A Java course I took in school had us writing a 'database' command
line app that held fake enrollment information. Had that kind of thing been
the only exposure to programming that I was given, I almost certainly would
not have entered the field. But show someone like me a way to automate or
expand something like Runescape or Minecraft? That, I'm interested in.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _A Java course I took in school had us writing a 'database' command line app
> that held fake enrollment information. Had that kind of thing been the only
> exposure to programming that I was given, I almost certainly would not have
> entered the field._

Me neither. That said, in retrospect, I believe university is more similar to
real jobs that people give it credit for - the _tedium_ only gets worse in a
typical dayjob. As much as I hate "fake enrollment DB" exercises, they're
pretty accurate description of how the work looks like.

(I used to want to go into gamedev professionally; due to various life events
I went a different way. Judging by stories from both HN and IRL people I know
from the industry, I may have dodged a bullet here.)

~~~
cgriswald
The thing that always bothered me is that the “fake enrollment DB” doesn’t
solve a problem anyone has. It’s play-acting at solving a problem. So you get
the tedium of work instead of the fun of play, but the productivity of play
instead of work.

Yeah, you can get there that way but it’s a slog, and the reward is a long way
off. That’s not like work. At work you get a regular paycheck even if
enrollment DB isn’t thrilling.

~~~
Mvhsz
I'm a teaching assistant for an intro to programming class, and I do feel that
solving an endless train of toy problems is problematic for students. From my
experience, the best way to learn is to understand a real problem, determine
it's requirements, then design a solution. However the professor and I
struggle to find real problems that are approachable for novices with varied
backgrounds.

I saw an open source class called nand to tetris where students had a semester
to create a machine that could play tetris, starting with only nand gates. I
thought that seemed like a much more fun progression for computer hardware
than the undergrad courses I took. I would love to discover something similar
for programming but so far I haven't found it.

~~~
adrianhel
Some things I'd have loved to be told to build:

    
    
        Simple 2d game
        To do app
        Timesheet app
        Implement a clone of x with something extra of your choosing
        Top Twitter celebrity app using its API
        Building a search engine
        Creating a programming language
    

An issue with the programming courses at my uni was that none of them used a
database. The programs were toy apps by design. Instruct students to use
sqlite or MongoDB, and encourage them to use PostgreSQL/MySQL.

Our database class did use databases, but we had no integration of the two
subjects.

~~~
the_watcher
To do app has always seemed an optimal one to me, since it should be
relatively accessible, no matter your prior experience, but infinitely
customizable. I remember a YC founder telling me that both pg and sama didn't
think there was a broadly available to do app that met their needs, so they
both rolled their own (and continue to update it as their needs change). That
seems like a pretty optimal intro project to me

------
justsoamazing
It's eerie how similar my own introduction to programming and business matches
the author's. I started playing Runescape in elementary school (I logged many
thousands of hours on the game) and eventually started programming because I
desperately needed to automate some aspects of the game (my parents restricted
video games to weekends only, which made it extremely difficult to meet my in-
game goals). After teaching myself Java, I moved onto Android development and
built a mobile app development agency that I ran throughout high school and
college.

People tend not to consider the positive impacts of gaming, but I think
there's something to be said for MMORPGs. Runescape has a complex economy,
captivating story telling, and complex inter-player dynamics - in other words,
a consequence-free playground that prepares kids for real life.

When I first started playing the game, I remember spending many hours
aimlessly walking around. It felt like I was an explorer of old; I'd come
across something new every hour. That feeling persisted throughout the years
as I unravelled new experience after new experience: learning to become a
merchant, joining a clan, killing a challenging boss for the first time, and
so on. Compared to the day-to-day boredom of middle school and high school,
perhaps it is only natural that kids gravitate to these online worlds.

~~~
UweSchmidt
The vast majority of people "lost in the gaming world" is not going into
programming or learning anything useful. Socially, it's a lot of "GG" and
insults to each others mothers. Connections in "clans" or "squads" are mostly
incredibly shallow and abstract, compared to hiking or playing sports in a
team or otherwise engaging in groups irl. Kids are physically underdeveloped
[1], programming MMORPGs is mostly treated as cheating and not encouraged.
Sure, in a billion life-years spent in games good things can happen, but
compared to the time invested? Not much imo.

It's absolutely understandable why kids gravitate to these online worlds but I
regret the time lost in games and if I could go back I'd really limit my
gaming to brief, enjoyable sessions, and invest my energy to more challenging
and ultimately rewarding things. Building skills, building real relationships.

[1]
[https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429](https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429)

~~~
debaserab2
> Socially, it's a lot of "GG" and insults to each others mothers. Connections
> in "clans" or "squads" are mostly incredibly shallow and abstract, compared
> to hiking or playing sports in a team or otherwise engaging in groups irl.

The best man at my wedding was a friend I played video games with that I met
online (in "clans"). In fact, I'm sitting in a Discord server right now with
about ten people that I've sat in a chat server of some sort since I was 14
years old (I'm 34 now). We meet up several times a year at different locations
for vacations. Some of us now live close together and regularly hang out with
each other's wives and kids. We still game together on a near nightly basis.

Maybe the relationships are only superficial and shallow if that's the level
of effort you put into them.

------
world32
A key take-away from this is that the author learned to code because he had a
real incentive to do so - in order to create bots to get better at runescape
and make lots of money as a side-effect of that. He quickly saw how knowing
how to code gave him abilities that his peers didn't have.

Now imagine if he tried to learn java by attending a class for it - i.e.
sitting there for an hour listening to some guy explain how a for loop works.
Chances are he would be bored silly and never get anywhere with coding. I
think its important for people learning how to code to have a genuine
motivation behind it - have something you actually WANT to build. Don't just
learn it so you can get a job.

~~~
astura
This is a really, really ignorant comment. I learned to code in the classroom
with no other motivation besides paid employment and wasn't "bored silly."
I've made a very successful career for myself in the many years since.

Programmers are not different from other professions no matter how special you
may feel.

~~~
world32
Hence why I said "Chances are" \- meaning "there is a high probably that".

------
tjbiddle
The Runescape "blackmarket" was a fun world to play in!

Like the author, I got into creating Runescape bots for a bit - but never
works to sell them, just made my own for fun and (in-game) profit.

As I dove deeper into the world, I came across people who would purchase a
monthly VPS and install botting software on it. There were plenty of guides on
how to go through - but no easy solutions for those who weren't technical.

Realizing I had an opportunity to capitalize on this - I built up a hosting
company dedicated to the Runescape botting niche. Each VPS would come pre-
installed with all the required software and make it dead simple to begin
botting within 5 minutes or so.

At my peak, I think I had over 100 dedicated servers each running anywhere
from 4-16 VPS on them. Some of my customers were using it to level up their
personal accounts, others were running gold-farming operations.

The business was fairly passive, and I learned a ton from the experience.
Things eventually came crumbling down when the creators of Runescape broke the
bots (This would happen on occasion, but things would be up and running within
a day or two normally) for a long time. I had to shut down as all my customers
left overnight.

~~~
gjs278
how did they break the bots? I made a very basic runescape autoclicker at
[https://www.garyshood.com/rsclient/](https://www.garyshood.com/rsclient/) I
wonder if it gets banned in game now.

~~~
lmpostor
That's you? Well first of all, thanks!

But I think your auto-typer was really one of the only "allowed" 3rd party
programs, and auto-clicking was never really enforced strictly.

When the bots got advanced, they pretty much had two methods via either
injection or emulation of the entire game. So either they broke them through
making a bunch of fundamental changes of ingame systems or the ability to
connect to the servers.

------
Slartie
Oh yeah, loved to read this! Gaming and especially moddable games are a great
entry into programming.

It wasn't exactly my entry, as I had programmed stuff before, but I learned a
huge lot during my university time while writing a database site for World of
Warcraft, which also had a distributed data collection mechanism by which
hundreds of thousands of users could upload data gathered while playing the
game to my site, where it would all be distilled into a database, of which a
special, minified copy was then compiled and offered to be downloaded by the
players right into the game, to be used while playing as a knowledge base. And
alongside of that, people could query the database via a web frontend that
used all the latest shit (it was 2007 or 2008, AJAX was a big deal back then,
reactive layouts were in their infancy, but I had one, and I even wrote a 3D
model viewer in the browser and something like Google Maps to view pre-
rendered maps of the game world that looked like satellite images). That thing
was 60k LOC Java (data processing and website), 30k LOC Lua (for the addon in
the game), about 5k LOC ActionScript, some hundred lines of PHP and Bash
scripts, and about 5-10k LOC of C++ for the native client to do data uploads
and downloads. I eventually sold it for about 60k€ including maintenance, and
maintained it as a side project for 7 years total (most of the time I was also
actively playing WoW) and then it was abandoned because the site didn't catch
on enough among the competition, and the game itself assimilated lots of the
functionality provided by my in-game database (which was named MobMap and did
catch on massively with the players, I counted at least 1.1 million installs
over it's lifetime) so that successful service became redundant over time and
was eventually discontinued as well.

But that project brought me lots of experience. Different programming
languages and runtime environments and contexts, operating a multi-server
infrastructure all by myself, using the latest web tech before there were
frameworks that did all the hard things for you, maintaining a codebase over a
long period, reverse-engineering (to get some of the data out of the game you
had to reverse the original game data file formats, and since they changed
with every patch, that was a continued activity done by a very small community
of people in obscure online wikis, to which I eventually started
contributing), updating large numbers of client installs in a secure and
reliable way, processing gigabytes of raw data per day into a concise database
(I think it was about 50GB XML incoming per day and the final DB was 4GB MySQL
- and it was pre-SSDs, so I had to work all in memory with that DB to get the
insert and update speeds I needed), this project had it all, and I continue to
draw from those lessons in my job today.

~~~
tyrust
Hey I probably used this back in BC. Thanks!

------
fbi-director
A nice story of how a young boy's enthusiasm and unhindered spirit got in the
right place at the right time. I feel happy for him and his family to stumble
upon this path in life - and then smashing it an building his own gold road!
Alas, I also feel sad at the same time, for myself not having that opportunity
and having wasted my programming skills all together after I went to
university,due to outside pressures and chasing my own dick, so to say.

~~~
xwdv
If it’s any comfort the alternative doesn’t turn out much better. Most of my
life I looked down on prurient interests and instead chose to master my
profession, convinced it had to be the smart choice.

Now I find myself on the wrong side of 30 with a collection of useless money
and assets slowly coming to accept that I’ll never have that ideal lifelong
relationship with someone that matters. Soon I’ll have more years behind me
than there are ahead and anyone I find will never have the shared experience
of being with me during my prime years. They can never be a life partner now,
they are simply a partner joining me as I age and go downhill from here.

I wish I had spent more time on the hunt when I still had my entire life ahead
of me. So if that’s what you did, don’t worry, it works out better in the end.

~~~
isodude
What is tough with happiness is that the more things you have the harder it is
to achieve. Or a perspective that effectively erase the chance of being
allowed to be happy.

My own path was to start dancing, a tough one like argentine tango, since it
requires full mental awareness. Which in effect means that you always come
home with a grin from side to side. This will be true with any form of
activity that actually makes you focus.

You always have the rest of your life ahead of you, it's up to you to make
something meaningful out of it. Don't set out to find a partner but rather
your passion (that involves other human beings not computers), and love will
find you. And as others wrote, it's a bit of luck involved, but you have to
give luck a chance to strike you.

I guess it's never too late, regretting stuff is always a downward spiral.

~~~
cutler
Same here. Took-up Argentine Tango at 45 and met more women than I could have
imagimed. Finally met my life partner at 52.

~~~
isodude
It balances up computer related work pretty well wouldn't you say?

~~~
cutler
More than that. In my mid-40s I had a weird back/neurological problem and
spent several futile years with physios, osteopaths and chiropractors. Then I
started going to a gym where an assistant recommended tango. The back problem
soon cleared-up.

~~~
isodude
Great for you!

For me it solved the puzzle of the meaning of life. After a couple of years I
had a dance where everything just flowed perfectly. I clearly remember the
feeling of 'dying' and being 'reborned'. That is now my point of reference
going forward.

------
rczhang
Holy shit! This is literally my story too. Playing runescape and writing
scripts for botting programs was literally how I learned to program.

I ended up becoming a moderator on the RsBot forums and I remember Autofighter
Pro when it came out. Super popular, and I didn't even realize it was made by
someone the same age as me back then!

Anyways, even though I didn't make any money (I gave my scripts away for
free!), I did learn a lot. I'm currently an engineer at Google and I honestly
owe it to the incredible monotony of playing Runescape.

~~~
methyl
Exactly the same story here. When I was 12 or 13 I tried to use bots in Tibia
to make some money on selling gold, eventually leading me to the path of
trying to write my own bots for different games. I had one of the first proof
of concept bot for Path of Exile which I reverse engineered myself.

I think it's really a great way to get into programming, since it's SUPER
rewarding to make the computer game work for you especially if you can sell
some of this work afterwards. I know for some people it can be viewed as a
shady practice, but I regret nothing ;)

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Tibia bot developer checking in as well. Started in 8th grade with Open Tibia
and have been at it since.

------
Crazyontap
Just for arguments sake if this was titled "How I made $200,000 gaming Hacker
news" where it's the exact same story but instead of writing for RSbots he was
writing bots for a site to game HN submissions and comments and manipulating
HN rankings instead we would have a completely different reaction, regardless
if it happened years ago.

Just a thought to put things into perspective.

~~~
teddyh
_Yes._ As criticizing and nitpicking which HN can be, it’s amazing how
uncritical many people here are as long as something simply _makes money_.
Doesn’t matter what it is – if it involves technology and makes money, then it
gets nothing but heaps of praise from the HN crowd.

~~~
Bakary
Whenever a post about privacy or freedom or some other unethical practice of a
tech company surfaces, I always wonder if people are critical for direct
reasons or because they can't have a piece of the pie.

There are white-hat hackers out there and people driven by passion, but even
Richard Stallman has enough income or social capital to lead a decent life.
Being a paragon of virtue is a luxury predicated on meeting a minimum living
standard.

~~~
someguydave
I notice a similar phenomenon with posts about Bitcoin; I always wonder if
criticism is due to genuine belief or jealousy/regret in missing out on the
first several orders-of-magnitude increase in value.

~~~
andirk
They were offered an easy, fun, tech-intensive, intellectually stimulating
game to play with the possibility of becoming a multi-millionaire if they
simply played. And they didn't. So now they wish for its demise.

~~~
someguydave
Precisely. They either wish its demise (“Bitcoin sucks and/or it’s dumb”) or
they want to invent a new game (“buy my altcoin!!”) in hopes that it generates
the same success.

I’m pretty convinced that anti-Bitcoin sentiment will be forgotten and/or
disdained in a few decades.

------
redleggedfrog
I like reading all the posts where people are like, "Hey, that's my story,
too!" Uplifting thread.

It most certainly takes motivation (I say passion) to become a self-taught
programmer. I think the "larval stage" ([http://www.hacker-
dictionary.com/terms/larval-stage](http://www.hacker-
dictionary.com/terms/larval-stage)) is critical. That transformation makes you
a different kind of programmer.

I am also a self-taught programmer, but I came at it from a different angle,
long before this internet age. I wasn't hacking on games (although I did do
that sometimes). I was hacking the machine (PC-XT!) and the OS and software
that ran on it. I was fascinated. I went from command-line, to scripting, to
Microsoft C, and then it took off from there, and I've been at it
professionally uninterrupted since 1990.

I didn't go back to school for CS, though. I wish I did, and am happy to see
other people here have. I think that's important. I had to teach myself all
the best practices (thank goodness for "Code Complete") or learn them on the
job.

This probably isn't 100% kosher, but this kind of story is a good indicator
when hiring. If you ask how someone got their start and it's this kind of
self-motivated journey they invariably make good employees. Over the years
we've most certainly noticed there is a significant difference in value
between someone who chose programming because it's a job and someone where
programming chose them.

------
willvarfar
Ah, its nice to reminicse!

Back in my day, games weren't online, and I didn't really have the hardware to
do them justice, nor the money to buy good hardware or games either. I
remember playing Wolfenstein 3D from a cover-disk in a tiny postage-stamp
sized window. At school we used to pass around cover-disks because we couldn't
all afford to buy every mag.

Anyway, I kind of started programming from the get-go, and for a long time,
programming _was_ my game. By the time I got to uni I found myself writing
modding tools and editors for various games that my friends played or wanted
to make mods for.

By then I had somehow found myself in a 'rogue' part of a very big company. I
was surrounded by contractors making £60/hour so I started my own contracting
company and was soon making way more money than I've ever made since.

Once I graduated I went into normal being-an-employee mode, and things have
been getting financially worse ever since.

So its interesting, scary and confusing to read this guy's account of how he
dropped out of school and has set up a stream of companies to sell his small
products. Interesting, obviously. Scary, because I fear that some young people
are reading it and thinking "I don't need school! I can make money!". Its the
same way I get all scared when my daughters tell me how much youtubers
apparently make. And confusing, because I can't spot the value in any of the
products and stuff he has created recently. I guess I really don't get this
whole social online world?! Perhaps I went in entirely the wrong direction all
those years ago when I went and got a normal job?

Good luck to him!

Not sure what advice I'd give to a young kid now, though. To be honest, I'm
not very keen on being an employee. But would you tell a kid to drop out of
school and try and get funding for an app they sell to colleges etc?

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I was surrounded by contractors making £60/hour so I started my own
> contracting company and was soon making way more money than I've ever made
> since.

> Once I graduated I went into normal being-an-employee mode, and things have
> been getting financially worse ever since.

> Scary, because I fear that some young people are reading it and thinking "I
> don't need school! I can make money!".

Um... did you need school? You skipped the part where it helped you. (And were
explicit that it hurt!) Why did you leave your personal contracting company?

~~~
willvarfar
I was part of a big company graduate-recruitment-program so I spent my summers
interning with them. Luckily I landed in a team they called 'FastTrack' and
that was where these contractors were. One of my war stories from that time:
[https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-e...](https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-
eight-in-a-million-chance)

When I went back to uni, I set up my contracting company and continued to work
for them, but now as a contractor. I even managed to get on their 'preferred
supplier' list, which was a really major coup. Anyway, it paid for uni.

------
rootw0rm
wow, this is kinda similar to how I got into coding and reverse engineering.
what got me into it was Ultima Online and my first serious effort at learning
coding was in C# of all languages. I focused on macroing and I helped
pioneer/consolidate hacks across (hundred+?) client versions. I made a
macroing client with built in script compilation (C# of course) which included
code completion and syntax highlighting back when it was pretty difficult to
do. the main difference is I decided to become a drug dealer instead of a
professional coder and though I had pretty amazing short term success I'm now
considered a violent felon by the state of California.

------
lowracle
When I was a kid, I learned so much about programming by doing those kinds of
"illegal" activities. When you are young you are reckless, adventurous, you
want to cheat the system. My first introduction to programming was through a
bot for a MMORPG too, which was used to harvest resources. I then started to
build bot for mini games where you could win prizes if you had the highest
score, and resold those prizes on second hand markets. I also learned about
"hacking" because it felt cool and underground. I believe kids should be
protected from the heavy legal repercussion you could have by doing those
things, as long as the intent was curiosity and a lack of awareness of laws.
Every thing is getting more protected/regulated and it has become so easy to
ruin your parents life if you are a little bit too curious. I don't really
know what the solution is, but I hope my kids will be able to experience like
I did !

------
mrunkel
I'm jealous. I made $700 for a two year project that started when I was 15. :)

When the project started, my partner and I (that's right, the $700 was for
both of us) thought that $700 was an enormous sum and that we were being very
clever. (This was in 1984).

After two years (18 months of which was after my partner left for college) I
finally was able to bring the project over the finish line.

~~~
ryanmercer
> thought that $700 was an enormous sum and that we were being very clever.
> (This was in 1984)

This made me laugh out loud, it reminds me of the prizes Atari would give
software devs via Atari Program Exchange (APX) contests, some of which teens
won, which would be a few hundred bucks (or sometimes more) of credit for
hardware usually, plus royalties on sales of the software

------
dzhiurgis
I don’t know why, but cheating in Runescape is hardest drug ever. I’ve got
banned in 2005, never touched gaming after that.

Anyone remember SCAR?

~~~
Chromozon
For those that don't know, SCAR is a scripting IDE. It was originally created
for Runescape, but it can easily be used for many other games or automated
tasks. Scripts are written in the Pascal programming language (super old
school!). The IDE provides the ability to focus on windows, track screen
coordinates, and get pixel color values. There is a large standard library of
functions- MoveMouse(), ClickMouse(), FindBitmap(), FindColor(),
TypeKeys('asdf')- basically all the building blocks necessary to emulate human
input. There are probably better scripting IDEs out there nowadays, but back
then, this was one of the best.

------
phasecode
I remember back around the same time in 2008ish, I was reading the old WoW
Glider (Glider was a Bot for WoW) forums and came across someone who was
running a massive WoW farm from Germany racking in close to 150k a year. It's
so interesting to see the transition both games have gone through to embrace
the Pay-To-(Somewhat)-Get-Ahead with both WoW offering Tokens ($20 for 150k
gold) and RuneScape offering Bonds ($7 for 4 million GP).

~~~
calledacheater
I dabbled in selling scripts for Wow, D3, RS, NeoPets way way back, even wall
hacks and auto-aim bits for FPS games... Wow was the best in my opinion - it
was fun waking every morning with an ungodly amount of loot, felt like
Christmas.

It led to a passion for process automation, both hardware and software.

The one thing I could never overcome were the people in my surroundings -
family, school, work ... they all said I was a cheat and if I cheat at video
games what else wouldn’t I cheat at, why stop there. I haven’t noticed one
comment regarding the ethics or morality of process automation for video games
even though almost all games ban it under TOS. Would be fun to have a game
encourage scripting.

------
WalterBright
"I began to spend much less time gaming, and the majority of my time
developing my bot."

That's what happened to me. I started playing games, then modifying them, then
writing my own, then the coding consumed all my time.

[https://www.classicempire.com/history.html](https://www.classicempire.com/history.html)

------
siliconc0w
It's kinda sad how games don't really work this way anymore. There are few
open-world sandbox games and mods aren't really a thing. It's "free-to-play"
skinner box treadmills from here on out.

~~~
rootw0rm
reverse engineering is your friend. i've modded all sorts of stuff that never
intended it... Full Tilt Poker back in the day, MechWarrior Online, Ultima
Online, etc. Learning how to hook into a program's functions and extract real-
time data without destroying the stack, properly calling game functions with
your own arguments, and translating your patches to new client versions is all
pretty interesting and gratifying IMO.

~~~
voltagex_
If you do this in any recent game you'll get banned. If you do this in any
Valve game you'll get VAC banned.

~~~
sean-duffy
Bots get you banned in Runescape too, which is what the OP article is about.
What's your point?

~~~
folkrav
Botting/cheat detection mechanisms have changed and evolved since RS.

------
contrahax
I also got started programming writing RS bots, private servers, cheat
clients, and eventually reverse engineering the game client (and sometimes
other people's scripts) to write bot frameworks. I remember talking smack to
the article author in the private RSBots script authors forums as a 13 year
old and getting banned a few times. Good memories of a great community, with
lots of people who ended up in solid careers doing impressive engineering
work. Every so often I get a DM from somebody who wants to meet up IRL to grab
a coffee almost 15yrs later. If anyone reading this remembers
Bomb/Contra/RFTO/RECoders hit me up!

------
vzhou842
I wonder how many people got into coding because of Runescape like the
author... I have almost the same origin story [1] and I know a lot of people
who also do.

[1] [https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-
programmer/](https://victorzhou.com/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/)

~~~
Nuzzerino
Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia (1994) has some coverage on the idea of a true
hacker and the "curious" personality archetype that matches it. It was more
than 10 years ago that I read it and it resonated strongly with me, so perhaps
it's worth a read if you like to understand more of the psychological roots.

[https://www.amazon.com/Cyberia-Trenches-Cyberspace-
Douglas-R...](https://www.amazon.com/Cyberia-Trenches-Cyberspace-Douglas-
Rushkoff/dp/1903083249)

~~~
dillonmckay
Great author.

Both fiction and non-fiction.

I highly recommend ‘Exit Strategy’.

------
jeremysalwen
Wow, exactly how I got into programming too! although I made 40$ in the end
instead of 200k :D The timing also matches up pretty well, I wonder if we
bumped into each other on the forums. I was on the scar forums, then SRL, but
the period I was most active was on villavu (iRobot), after Arga came out I
started to become less active. I wasn't at all involved with the RSbot scene
and knew almost nothing about it.

~~~
markus92
Hi there!

~~~
jeremysalwen
THE GenoDemoN?? How are you and ruler doing? Do you remember Lardmaster?

(I also remember that I became inactive, and then some scammer hacked my
account, which may have left a bad taste in your mouth because you thought it
was me)

------
Nuzzerino
I had a similar idea for Asheron's Call, to build a modular plugin system for
its bots. People could in theory be authorized to receive a plugin, which
would be beamed from the server and dynamically injected at runtime.
Reasonably secure copy-protection (aside from the rare determined and skilled
hacker). I even had about 10k lines of code written, but it wasn't very
impressive (although there were some interesting gems). Sadly, the game
started getting DDOSed, which led to a sharp drop in population and
abandonment of the project around 2014. The game shut down within a couple
years after that.

I love the concept of making interesting bots for games that aren't originally
intended for bots, but it's becoming harder and harder to do so given the
issue of cheating. Makes for a major risk to a project that is already hard to
justify doing. I believe Blizzard has sued someone for making and selling a
game bot, so there is precedent for legal trouble as well, which is very
unfortunate for hobbyists.

~~~
robohydrate
I got my start programming because I was interested in writing plugins for the
Decal framework.

------
wyldfire
I'm assuming that these bots impact other gamers -- either through some
negative consequence for human gamers or overall inflation of the MMO
marketplace. If that's the case, then these bots seem terribly antisocial.
OTOH it seems like youthful mischief is a rite of passage for software
developers.

Regardless of how you started: good for you, and good luck with your career!

~~~
folkrav
As much as I despise them, they basically are to be expected in any MMO these
days. There isn't much to be done against them. These big third-party
marketplaces using hundreds of bot accounts don't really care about getting
banned - as long as they make enough sales, they can just buy new accounts ad
vitam aeternam. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more shady ones used
stolen accounts.

------
lone_haxx0r
A "teenager does X" post that is actually worth reading.

~~~
Izmaki
Including or excluding the 40% fluff that was added seemingly because the
author wanted to tell a good story more than anything? :P

------
maribozu
Apologies for not really related question - is there a way to bypass Medium
"login wall"? That's probably the third time this week I see "sign up for
extra free reading". No any intention to sign up to Medium tbh.

~~~
bigzyg33k
Further to the comments below, you can also just delete the sites cookies,
assuming that you're not logged in

------
Bucephalus355
Does anyone remember The New Yorker article from June 2018 about the magazine
“Teen Boss” that described similar stories regularly, except that it was
marketed to pre-teens and teens?

The cover of one of their issues is really something to behold:
[https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-very-
unnervi...](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-very-unnerving-
existence-of-teen-boss-a-magazine-for-girls)

~~~
cheschire
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.

------
GordonS
I also got into programming through game mods, but for me in started with
making maps for Duke Nukem 3D (yes, of '96 vintage!), and then 3D modelling
and QuakeC mods.

A lot of people I collaborated with ended up working in the games industry,
either on games like Unreal, or in journalism. I ended up working in the
enterprise, but from the many bad stories of life in the games industry,
perhaps it was a lucky escape :)

------
ensiferum
The perfect mix of dumb luck and foolishness. Bet he had no idea of the
business opportunity that was arising. And to think that many people spend
their lives trying to find a small niche and build businesses and fail each
time.

------
DEDLINE
Reading this article + accompanying comments has me reminiscing on how awesome
the Runescape community was back in the day. Scripting for SCAR, Moderating on
Sythe.org (screen name Puto & Heist if anyone's out there) and trafficking
massive amounts of internet goods via PayPal bring back some of my fondest
memories on the internet.

I credit a good portion of my career success today to Runescape-centric
experiences in CS, Business and Community Politics.

Thank you Andrew Gower + JaGeX team for creating a game much larger than
itself.

~~~
Topgamer7
Runescape was great for anyone with parents who wouldn't let you install
things. All you needed was a browser and java, super low bar for entry into
the world of grinding.

------
Zenst
You may want to address some of the comments upon your twitter app, if your
going to promote it as an achievement. Though appreciate that it was last
updated in 2014, so API's being as they are - change over time and would
explain the aspect that it doesn't work now.

But amazing stuff and self-taught is kinda how many get into coding. How I got
into IT back in the 80's. The aspect of bailing out your parents, that is
something to be extremely proud of and a life achievement anybody can respect.

------
jokoon
So... made money to cheat the game? How is that a great story?

------
nickjj
I love reading stories like this.

Gaming is also one of the main things that got me into web development and
programming too.

One of my first real projects beyond a Geocities personal site was a gaming
ladder in 2000ish that a friend coded and I designed. It was basically a SAAS
app for people to schedule, report and rank competitive Quake 3 matches. That
project alone helped kick off a career in freelancing and I haven't stopped in
nearly 20 years.

------
Myrmornis
This is a great story. In my experience this sort of gaming-based route to
programming expertise is not uncommon among programmers, and I suspect that it
is a contributing factor to the gender imbalance. Scanning the quite large
thread, I’m curious whether anyone is actually non-male at all.

------
wyclif
A couple of quick questions I wanted to ask the author (if he sees this):

How did you manage to hide the money from your family and friends when you
were still keeping your programming secret, before you told your parents? Did
you have any problems getting certain bank accounts or cards because of age
restrictions?

------
Adamantcheese
I made an actual robot to automate hi alching for me a year or two ago, to
work around the whole "no software" thing. It just pressed the mouse button
for over a month every ~0.6 seconds. Totally worth it. Just had to check on it
every 24 hours when the client timed itself out.

------
calebio
Great story, Rodney! You've done very well for yourself.

My background shares some similar elements of yours during the same time
period albeit with a different game, Habbo Hotel, and a lot less money :-).

In a few years we'll start to see more from the Minecraft and redstone
generation.

------
rkachowski
What I find the most impressive is that someone was able to get a serious
career start from one of the "Teach Yourself X in 21 days" books. I'd always
dismissed these as proto-clickbait without any meaningful content. Shows what
I know

~~~
world32
That book was not his sole source of information.

------
orian
I've learned tree searching and tree pruning when trying to write a bot
finding the optimal way to play OGame (was about 14-15y old).

Never really manage to write the full bot, didn't know English well enough and
the resources in my language were poor ;-(

------
NKCSS
I love this, because I can relate to it a lot, my story is very similar.

I started at age 12, with QBasic and VB6, writing Trojans because that was
what fascinated me at the time. A few years later, when .NET was introduced, I
moved over to VB.NET. At the time, I was playing a web-based game called
"BootLeggers.us". When I got into an accident, my leg was messed up, and I
couldn't move off of a couch for a few days (stairs were not possible), I was
still young and alone @home for a week because my parents were on holiday. I
laid on that couch for 3 days, playing BootLeggers on a laptop, with my arm on
a side-table. The worst position ever. I did this nearly 3 days straight, and
it was when I first got carpal tunnel. I couldn't do anything for quite a
while because it felt like my arms were on fire all the time :-/

Some time passes, and I can use a computer again for a bit, without too much
pain, but I was no longer able to play Bootleggers, since I could not stay on
the PC for that lang due to my carpal tunnel.

The game is basically a set of actions you can do every X time. I had written
small 'timer' applications that warn you when your next action is available,
and I thought: why not automate a bit more of the game, since I can't play it
for the duration I want to myself, so I started creating an application to do
so. I've spent about a year and created a bot that could do everything in the
game. It used an embedded webbrowser that was fully automated, so it was not
detectable. You could play the game yourself in the application, and if you'd
stop, the app would take over and continue playing, that way you could do
complex interactions with people yourself if you wanted, and add some non-
obvious behaviour, making it harder to detect.

At the time, I was able to run the bot for weeks on end; I had it set up to
take around 3 hours of downtime each day to make sure it would be 'defendable'
to have a lot of activity, still, my account would rank faster than any other
on the platform.

The game then introduced CAPCHAs to the game, and the bot would not be able to
continue. So, I created my own OCR engine and got it working again. Over the
time, I've written 3 complete new implementations of the OCR engine, each
working better than the previous. It was amazing to do and I learned a lot
from it. Had a whole crew who I shared my programs with, had it locked down on
your CPU serialnumber, HDD serialnumber and mac address to prevent it
spreading to people who were not 'authorised', etc.

It was definetively the thing that really made me more in love than ever with
programming, the sheer power you wield and adoration you get from people you
share your stuff with was amazing.

Only thing that came close to this, was when I created the first online
rainbowtable lookup serivce for hacking Tompson modems (got me on national tv
news for a feature peace years later as well. It's dutch but you can watch it
here if you want:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfCEe9MuZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfCEe9MuZg)
).

Been writing software ever since I was 12, and still love it now. I started my
own company finally two months ago after being the CTO of a startup for a
year, and I'm so happy I did it, because I feel like, now I might get some
time to get into some crazy project again :)

I have so much more to tell, but I think I'll take some more time later on and
just write a big blogpost, but it was fun to relive some of that history again
:)

------
quickthrower2
These stories are entertaining but one must always remember there is some
element of luck when things like this happen, and plenty of people coding side
projects and not making a dime. So don't feel bad if you didn't make enough
money top buy a house while you were are school!

~~~
WalterBright
You've got to give luck an opportunity to find you, by getting involved in
things.

Once the author saw the opportunity, he then pivoted to exploit it through a
lot of time and effort. It's pretty clear that other bot makers did not see
that opportunity, or saw it and did little.

~~~
quickthrower2
My perspective is you make your own luck - and really you are making a lottery
ticket with probably much better odds than a real lottery ticket, and other
upsides (if you fail you gain experience). But it's still a lottery ticket so
it is not always useful to disect someone else success and say "oh they woke
up at 4am every day, so I'll do that to be successful" etc.

------
indigodaddy
There are MacBook images strewn about the article, which definitely fits with
hip coder culture, but I doubt he started coding in the Mac ecosystem, given
how he started out in gaming? More likely he started coding in Windows....

if so, then all the MAC art in the article is slightly curious to me. Totally
fine (I am currently a Mac user, and I’m sure the author is now as well) of
course.

------
alfonsodev
this story checks the "solve your own problem/scratch your own itch" advice
for entrepreneurs/makers, you can tell it must be very satisfactory, it is
motivating to read such stories.

------
black_13
How I made minimum when I was 16 and I was underpaid. Cherypicking story.

------
tomglynch
@rodneyg_, the link to 'cold-emailing Mark Cuban' is broken

~~~
rodneyg_
Thank you so much for pointing it out!! Fixed it.

------
tnr23
for me it was similar but with the game Tibia

------
neeraga
How come a listing with full details available publically can never make it to
top of Ycombinator but a medium article with gated content ranks on top?

~~~
dang
What do you mean by "a listing with full details available publically"? Can
you give examples of articles you feel should make it to the top to HN but
haven't?

The answer to why this one is doing well is clear from the comments: a lot of
readers found a lot to identify with in the article. That's the important
thing, not what site it appears on.

------
xxkylexx
Hey Rodney. Nice to see you on HN. - You know who :)

~~~
rodneyg_
Hey Kyle!!! It's been awhile. ;)

