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Do you remember the FIRST project made by you?

ashish on May 23, 2022

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 lo...
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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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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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Ben Sinclair

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

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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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ashish

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

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Keff

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

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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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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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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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ashish

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

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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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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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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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ashish

sounds interesting ✨

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Christopher Rodriguez

Thank you!

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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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ashish

a mess you can be proud of :)

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Fikri Ahmadi

yes i remember. I did programming since i entered in my college in 2016. First time, i didn't know about programming, even i read flowchart and pseudocode still not understand. And off course, time by time, i was able to write code with C++. Until in 2019, there was a project that first time i received from my friend in my village. By chance, in that year in my village held general election to choose village head. And my friend asked me to make an application that can map voters in my village. First time i was confused to what technology or programming language that i wanted to use. Finally after asked into my friend who had experienced in programming, i choosed laravel for developing my application . So thats it, the simple story about my first project,,, :)))

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ashish

thanks for sharing ❤

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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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ashish

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

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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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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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Chris Greening • Edited

Black and white text adventure title screen reading Dungeon! by Chris Greening November 2017

For my physics degree I was taking a required class on Fortran and although I understood the classwork I just wasn't feeling any passion for it. Throughout the semester the professor repeatedly blasted Python as a waste of time for physicists and it got to the point where I was like "hm you know what I'm gonna learn some Python just to spite this guy" so I installed Python and immediately fell in love (which subsequently changed the course of my life)

My first project was a text adventure (Dungeon!) that I wrote during the following long weekend and I still consider that to be one of my proudest accomplishments in both programming and life in general (despite being the most awful code I've ever written). I have it backed up just about everywhere as I am very fond of going back to it and reflecting on it every once in a while

I wrote some additional backstory on it in this blog post I wrote a while back:

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ashish

amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing, I actually started playing on the site 😆 the photography section is amazing as well, the text based rpg game looks fine too, I actually played something very similar on itch.io some days ago!

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Prudence97

It was a log in page in HTML and CSS, that was early February of 2022🤧 My kid sister was the expert at the time and I kept bugging her.
"What do I do next" "it's not working!!, Why is it not working" these days I tend to figure things out myself, I've probably misspelt something or left our a symbol.

But I remember being so happy the first time I wrote that Hello World, seeing that it appeared on the browser all from the code editor.

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ashish

same, I feel so good looking at my old works it was not easy but we figured it out :)
cheers!

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Graham Morby

The first project for me was a simple text based adventure game made for my Amiga 500! Wow thats going back some years!! 1995 I think it was - now its all Python and Javascript

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ashish

that's really a long time :O

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Graham Morby

it feels it now! But good old days!

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Richard Guay

My first project was a determinate of matrix using PDP-11 assembly when I was 14 (My older brother was in college and had an account on the PDP-11). I always aim very high! My next programs were in Basic on the Commadore computer for simulating robot intelligence. An alpha robot (pure reflexive) and a beta robot (reflexive with memory of what worked). I didn’t have enough memory for the gamma robot (basic generalization). I was following a book written with a different Basic version that I had to adapt. I forgot the name of the book. It was a lot of fun!

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Florian Klenk

My first usable projects where websites based on newspro a pearl cgi script that stores articles in textfiles.
I modiefied the shit out of it so that it works for most purposes, mostly counter strike clan websites.
Then someone suggested to use PHP and I started to dig into it.
I was using it script based and it was a mix of html, css and php all together in one glorious fuckup only I was able to read.

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ashish

glorious indeed! 💪

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Abhinav Kulshreshtha • Edited

Library Management system written in FoxPro . My local township library gave me 5 year membership with unlimited checkout, as a payment for that. I was in 7th class at that time.

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ashish

that's amazing! building something like that in 7th standard, I started coding seriously when I was in 10th standard

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Abhinav Kulshreshtha • Edited

Foxpro was a great language, it was programming language and a database engine bundled together. I still have grudge against Microsoft for killing it.

I think it was around 1997-8, so things were much simpler.

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Shane Duffy

Oh man, well there were a few small things I did, but my first real "software" was a little utility tool with C# and WPF for getting pixel color from your mouse position on Windows. This was like 2013!

It ended up being pretty useful over the years so a few years back I gave it a little UI overhaul and put it on the Windows store.

Here's a link on my site :)

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ashish

That's so unique, btw, I just love your portfolio's minimal design shows exactly what it's supposed to show, no nonsense and all the projects are jsust amazing ❤

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ashish

amazing!!

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Somtochukwu Nnaji

Wow

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Alexander Konarev

Database for real estate dealers on Clarion 2.1 for DOS. It seems like 1992. The first project that was bought :)

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ashish

great!

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ashish

it looks quite good for a first project :)

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Sort of, it was a html page and there was something yellow on it..

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ashish

😆sounds interesting

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Tawhid

Haha yes if memory serves it was a personal blog website.Nothing cool but that's where I started

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Fernando Groders

The first one no, but I remember working on a text version of Minecraft using Java. It was awful xD

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ashish

no worries, mine are more awful XD

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ashish

i like the minimal look, gives off retro vibes :)

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hacker4world

My first project was a discord bot to moderate and protect my old server, it was tough project but had a lot of fun building it

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ashish

great!

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Ahlam77

Yes i remember , was 1 year ago.

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Jose E Saura

Yes :')
Python Scraper with React Dashboard and mongodb.

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ashish

sounds good !

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NGS Harsha

a long time ago, I wrote a twitter scraper, now it is not working anymore 🤣

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ashish

but you remember the project at least :)

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ashish

woah, rpg game on a tl84 calculator! I remember watching a youtube video about this where they made games on calculator, that's very creative for first project ✨

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Gedi

oh yes i do!

Build a site for my friends restaurant with a simple CSS & HTML. Did not got approval from a friend, but this project got me first dev job. I would say very succesfull. !

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ashish

that's great!

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Andrew Baisden

It's probably not my first project but it's on my GitHub. It's a portfolio website I made in 2010. Super basic with far too much 3D and not enough code. And it uses an obsolete language 🙃

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ashish

Is it this one? github.com/andrewbaisden/andrew-ba...
I love it!

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Andrew Baisden

Did you manage to get it working? 😂

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ashish

no lol, just saw the screenshots and the code

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Andrew Baisden

Probably for the best it would set your computer on fire trying to run Flash 🤣🤣🤣

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Thomas Hansen
10 PRINT "THOMAS HANSEN IS COOL"
20 GOTO 10
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

It was on an Oric 1, and it didn't even have lower case characters if I remember correctly ... ;)