On: “A calculator app? Anyone could make that”

[throwaway2037]

Nice story. Thank you share. For years, I struggled with the idea of "message passing" for GUIs. Later, I learned it was nothing more than the window procedure (WNDPROC) in the Win32 API. <sad face>

    > However I wasn't sure how to improve further without help, so my mom found me an IT school.

This sounds interesting. What is an "IT school"? (What country? They didn't have these in mine.)

[nagonago → throwaway2037]

This was in Bangkok, Thailand, although the school itself was run by Indians. They had IT courses for both kids and adults.

Fortunately I think these days there are a lot more options for kids to learn programming, but back then the options were pretty limited.

[sokz → throwaway2037]

Probably institutes teaching IT stuff. They used to be popular (still?) in my country (India) in the past. That said, there are plenty of places which train in reasonable breadth in programming, embedded etc. now (think less intense bootcamps).