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ashish
ashish

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Do you remember the FIRST project made by you?

Do you remember the very first project made by you when you started learning to code in a particular programming language or framework? I always look at my old projects as they show me how long it's been and how far I have been able to come and how much of a better programmer/developer I am than earlier. Why not share your first projects with everyone, don't worry about it not being good, first projects are never the perfect, even if you are a beginner and currently making your first project, I would love to know about them!

I will be posting my first projects in the comment section 👇

Top comments (69)

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair • Edited

Do I remember? No :)

The first thing I remember completing was an adventure game in, oh probably 1988 or thereabouts. I called it Arcanum and it's lost to time now.

It had a puzzle in it where a man with a market stall disappeared at night, and you could break into the building to steal his supplies only to find out it was a full moon and he was a "werehouse". I thought I was funny.

The first thing I gave to other people could have been a crack for the PC game "Archipelagos" which for some reason got re-released with copy-protection demanding a word from a page in the manual, but the re-release didn't include the manual... so I fixed that. That might still exist on some dusty FTP site somewhere.

It might also have been a PC speaker silencer I wrote. People in my school liked playing games in the library. People in my school were not allowed to do this, and games made beeps that gave them away. I wrote a little executable which you could run that would load another executable and patch it in-place to remove the calls that made sound. You could run silence sopwith to play the game "Sopwith" for example. A few people used that.

The first thing I can find where I actually still have the code is my first-year university game 3doxo which is a text-mode 3D noughts-and-crosses (or "tic-tac-toe") game with two-player or computer opponent modes. It's adequate, and I think it's not awful for the era, but at the same time... it's awful.

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

damn, 6 yrs old project, feels so good looking at old projects ngl, you have made a lot of good stuff :O

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

6-year-old repo... 29-year-old code :)

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff

I do, not the best project, and makes me cringe whenever I check it out xD
It was a html pre-processor kind of thing. The code is quite crappy and naive, though I really enjoyed building it.
github.com/nombrekeff/STML

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saptakbhoumik profile image
SaptakBhoumik

It is actually very useful tbh

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

it's a cool project, actually quite unique for something people make when they learn something new!

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nombrekeff profile image
Keff

Cheers, quite the complex one too, I learned a lot though xD

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paratron profile image
Christian Engel • Edited

If I remember it correctly, the first real project except of toying around was a Tamagochi-like game written in QBASIC and running in DOS off a 3.5" floppy disc.

The cool thing was that you could train attacks to your Tamagochi and it had a multiplayer mode where you had to swap your floppy with the one of a friend upon game start and they could battle eachother.

The graphics were basically a text interface with the Tamagochis drawn with basic circles and lines.

I was around 11 years old and I got my copy of QBASIC off a CD from a games magazine which - besides demos - included software submitted by other readers of the magazine. Because no one would have the money to pay for a QBASIC version which emitted executables, everyone sent in their game as source code alongside a copy of the QBASIC software. One had to open it, load the sources and start it. I had no internet access these days, so it was incredibly valuable to be able to read the code of other software.

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

thats so coooooooool! classic but unique project, do you still have it?

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kayis profile image
K

The very first thing I programmed that was used by other people was a mIRC script.

It would scrape news headlines from a website and send them to a channel.

This was like 2002 or something. I didn't know how to program.

I basically copied everything from an existing script and replaced the URL. I also had to rewrite some parts that extracted the headlines from the HTML.

I remember quite fondly looking at loops and arrays and not understanding any of it. Like, I was reading Mandarin or something.

The code is long lost, but I felt like quite the coder. Some of my friends were writing mIRC scripts all the time, but they wouldn't know how to use a HTTP client or anything.

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

I can feel you, I used to copy code too and look at them run, it was so fun intentionally running endless loops haha

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simeg profile image
Simon Egersand 🎈

My first serious project was for a friend of mine. He needed a website for his business and I volunteered to make one.

My only previous experience was creating a blog in school, so I knew how to operate the full stack (barely!).

I had no idea there were smart editors. I used Coda (now called Nova). This was 10 years ago and it was very basic. Basically a good looking Notepad.

I spent so much time on it. HTML, CSS and JS. No frameworks or anything. I got it working and was very proud.

Days later someone emails him saying "Hey, you have a pretty serious security issue here". He told me and I was like 🙈.

Years later, I opened up the project in PhpStorm and oh my god, so many automatic improvements was suggested and I cleaned up so much code.

Ahh the good old days 😌

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

10 years ago, damnnnnn, making websites using only vanilla html,css and js makes me remember the old projects lol, still remember making unresponsive projects as I didn't know abut media queries 😆

all of these stories in the comments are so good, I feel like saving them somewhere, thanks for sharing your first project simon ❤

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simeg profile image
Simon Egersand 🎈

10 years ago people didn't really care about responsive websites 😄 Which was good for me 😂

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Christopher Rodriguez

Well it’s easier for me since I started programming about a month ago. I created a short and simple game called Shooting hoops. Literally the goal was to make as many shots as you can in a basketball hoop in 24 seconds.

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

sounds interesting ✨

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chrisgomad profile image
Christopher Rodriguez

Thank you!

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miguelmj profile image
MiguelMJ

Yes, my first year in university I started a CLI application to manage DnD games, players, items... All in C++ and with zero knowledge of databses, GUIs or third party libraries 😂
It was a complete mess, as you can imagine.

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

a mess you can be proud of :)

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Jan Küster

After school in 6th grade there was an html workshop for those who were interested. I was there with one other classmate and we crates a plain html homepage (yes including marquee) but the best was that on the machine was CS 1.4 installed and the workshop supervisor was absent for a while 😍

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

I used to make weird projects whenever our teacher/instructor would be late or absent, used to be so much fun 😆

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

Here's the list of my first projects based on languages-

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Oskar Pietrucha

It was the project that get me into the programming and web development. As a huge home assessment in elementary school we were supposed to create a project, which it's preparation should take whole year (10 months). Back then I was a WoW player and admired the game a lot, so I wanted to make a website about it, but I had like no experience at all.
So I stole the source code of the website which I liked and started scrapping it, by changing some random words and looking for them on the website. Then I started googling stuff like "how to change image" and so, and so, and here I am working in the industry for more than a 5 years now.

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

it all starts by you copying a site's code and ends with others copying your site's code 😆