Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).
Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
I’m in my mid-30’s now. In high school I learned HTML because I really wanted to customize the styling of my Guild (I think that’s what it was called).
And then built a neopets fan site and forum which taught me basic business (trading links with other fan sites, hiring/managing forum moderators, and eventually sold the fan site during junior year).
The will to customize my MySpace profile was also a driver for learning HTML.
I sometimes think about this in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly.
I followed this exact same path. Started with HTML for guilds, learning to slice PSDs and ended with learning VB6 to develop auto buyers / adopters :D Slopdog forums was my inspiration for using VB I think?
Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you could sell your omelettes.
I had a very similar experience. Writing the HTML to spruce up the homepage of my Neopets guild was my first introduction to any website creation or programming.
Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).
Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
Same here!
I’m in my mid-30’s now. In high school I learned HTML because I really wanted to customize the styling of my Guild (I think that’s what it was called).
And then built a neopets fan site and forum which taught me basic business (trading links with other fan sites, hiring/managing forum moderators, and eventually sold the fan site during junior year).
The will to customize my MySpace profile was also a driver for learning HTML.
I sometimes think about this in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly.
I followed this exact same path. Started with HTML for guilds, learning to slice PSDs and ended with learning VB6 to develop auto buyers / adopters :D Slopdog forums was my inspiration for using VB I think?
Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you could sell your omelettes.
I had a very similar experience. Writing the HTML to spruce up the homepage of my Neopets guild was my first introduction to any website creation or programming.
neopets also changed my life. some a-hole stole my account and after that, elementary school me became deeply conscious of infosec.
Ragnarok Online private servers communities did pretty much the same for me. We were very die-hard on PHP, MySQL, C and ancient JS/CSS.