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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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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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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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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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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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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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asheeshh profile image
ashish

thanks for sharing ❤

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asheeshh profile image
ashish

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

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devoskar profile image
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 😆