First Line of Code
Every builder has an origin moment. Mine was a question asked by a bored 9-year-old during a global pandemic: "How are these games made?"
The Question
I was an avid gamer. Like, genuinely addicted to games. When COVID hit in 2020 and the world shut down, I suddenly had unlimited screen time and nothing else to do. School was a Zoom call. Going outside was not an option. So I played more games. A lot more games.
But at some point, instead of just playing, something shifted. I started wondering how the thing I was playing actually worked. Who made this? How? What does it take to make a character jump when you press a button? The question would not go away.
I asked my parents. They said: coding. That single word opened a door I have not walked back through since.
MindChamp and Scratch
My parents enrolled me in classes at MindChamp, a coding school. I was 9 years old. The first thing I learned was Scratch -- block coding, drag and drop. You snap colourful blocks together and things happen on screen. It is Lego for the screen, and for a kid who loved building things, it was perfect.
Scratch taught me the fundamentals without me even realising they were fundamentals:
- Logic and conditionals -- if this, then that
- Loops -- repeat forever, repeat until
- Variables -- keeping track of scores and states
- Event-driven thinking -- when clicked, when key pressed
I built little games -- platformers, quizzes, animations. Nothing that would impress anyone, but the feeling of making a computer do what I told it to do? That was magic. Pure, addictive magic.
Why It Changed Everything
That first Scratch session was not just learning a skill. It was discovering a superpower. I went from being someone who consumed things on a screen to someone who could create things on a screen. That shift -- from consumer to creator -- is the single most important change that has ever happened to me.
Without that question, there is no Python. Without Python, there is no Buildspace. Without Buildspace, there is no Tipp, no LockIn, no Simplifly. The entire chain of everything I have built traces back to one bored kid in lockdown asking how games work.
The Irony
The irony is not lost on me. Gaming -- the thing that parents worry is rotting their kid's brain -- is the thing that led me to coding, which led me to building real products, which is now funding my path to becoming a pilot. The addiction to playing games became an addiction to making things. Same energy, different output.