10 years of programming

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:02]Oh, heck.

[00:00:04]Do you remember how you got here?

[00:00:06]Um, that's a weird question. Uh, I walked from your house to this shed here. Why are we filming in a shed, by the way?

[00:00:15]No, I mean in the broader sense. How did you get here?

[00:00:20]Well, I drove my car.

[00:00:23]No, I'm asking for your life story, man.

[00:00:26]Oh.

[00:00:27]Well, let me start at the beginning.

[00:00:29]Which is a very good place to start.

[00:00:32]And it starts right here.

[00:00:36]I'm a cartoon. Why am I a cartoon?

[00:00:39]Because that is the beginning. One day, I was in the shower and I had a thought, a shower thought you might say. Zach plus cartoons equals Zachoons. And from that day on, the name has clung to me, whether I willed it or not. You can still find my old channel on YouTube.

[00:00:58]But two-dimensional cartoons wasn't enough. I had to expand. I installed Blender and set to work learning how to create three-dimensional art. I also enjoyed making goofy movies with my sister. In fact, I had been doing that for years, but now I experimented with combining 3D effects and 2D videos.

[00:01:20]It wasn't long before I expanded again to what some consider the fourth dimension, time. Static 3D images weren't interesting enough. I wanted to interact with them. So, I began venturing into game development and so, this channel began.

[00:01:36]But hold on, I skipped a part way back at the beginning. Unfortunately, my story is not nicely linear.

[00:01:44]When I was around 10 years old, I joined a Scratch class at school. That was my first introduction to programming. My dad also signed me up to a Python Turtle class.

[00:01:54]But I didn't really understand any of that and just looked at all the cool stuff the other kids did. In fact, I was largely inferior even to some of my fellow Scratch programmers. I remember one of my peers made a painting program which amazed me. You can tell because I made my own shabby replica. I tend to see something which amazes me and I want to build it myself to make it my own, you know?

[00:02:18]There was a browser game which went around at school called One day it was show and tell and I was going to show off my incredible Broforce clone. Unfortunately, the teacher had maxed out the volume of the projector and the first thing which tore at our ears was She shut it down very quickly and sent me back to my seat.

[00:02:45]Inappropriate.

[00:02:47]I also remember this 3D first-person shooter game. That was really impressive because you can only draw 2D lines in Scratch at the time. The inner workings of this wondrous magic was completely opaque to me.

[00:03:02]Back to where we left off. Minecraft, Fortnite and Clash of Clans. These were my next projects, very achievable or so I believed. So I downloaded Unity, opened YouTube and started following tutorials word for word. Then more tutorials to the letter. Then more tutorials. Eventually, I just stopped needing them and when Dani started making Karlson, I was able to build a half-decent replica. It was even unfinished just like Karlson, but it was way better than any of my previous projects and I started to explore other ideas, too. My own ideas. Well, as much mine as an idea can be. Arcanus, Immigo, that two-colored one.

[00:03:46]The next thing I started learning was JavaScript. I followed literally this tutorial, but I didn't get far before deciding it was weird and proceeded to learn HTML and CSS while building my first website. I did later return to JavaScript with my dad's help to build Square, this simple puzzle game. And since then, I've used JavaScript various times for building server-related stuff.

[00:04:10]For example, there was a period where I really wanted to make my own messaging app. I eventually realized that there are already way too many messaging apps, and it's unlikely I'd be able to improve things.

[00:04:23]Next up was building a game without Unity, Minesweeper. Instead of a game engine, my dad prompted me to use WPF.

[00:04:31]This was my first time using a GUI framework, and it was a bit confusing doing everything in code instead of placing it and scaling it graphically.

[00:04:40]But obviously, I overcame those challenges. Then, I started making a Minecraft mod. This was the first time I had to delve into documentation myself.

[00:04:49]Actually, maybe the second time, cuz I wrote a Discord bot at some point.

[00:04:56]Anyway, after working on this for a while, I took a long break from YouTube because I had begun working part-time for my dad.

[00:05:05]One day, my dad was telling me about this new programming language that he'd heard of. Apparently, it was perfectly memory safe. I wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounded good, so I started learning Rust.

[00:05:16]Rust introduced me to the world of unmanaged languages and the concept of memory ownership. Learning Rust put rocket boots on my journey to understanding how a computer fundamentally works. During this quiet time, I also briefly did some research into machine learning, but found it too complicated and boring to pursue.

[00:05:39]Any young boy dreams of hosting his own Minecraft server using this legendary thing called port forwarding. However, in order to forward ports, you must first know what a port is and how to forward it. So, I started learning about self-hosting and Linux. I quickly learned that a Raspberry Pi is the only thing you can self-host on. So, with my increasing financial independence, I bought myself a Raspberry Pi and I got my dad to get my ISP to assign us a static IP address. Through my internet research, I also learned that anyone who installed Arch Linux immediately gained the respect of everyone who knew that they installed Arch Linux. Arch, by the way, is a common way of signaling this virtue. So, I installed Arch Linux on my freshly obtained Raspberry Pi and got to work. I set up a web server, Caddy, a Matrix server, an XMPP server, a CalDAV server, and attempted to set up an email server, but this was very complicated with Postfix, which is the server that most people recommend. But, after experimenting with OpenBSD, I switched to using OpenSMTPD, which is much easier to configure. Learning about the Linux ecosystem was necessarily paired with learning about privacy and security. Turns out it's pretty easy for people to spy on your online activity.

[00:06:55]And I was like, "Stuff you. You want my data? Come get it." I installed Arch Linux on my laptop, Calyx on my phone.

[00:07:02]In fact, I got a Google Pixel phone just so I could use GrapheneOS. I used Mullvad browser and I switched to Matrix for communications where possible. I used Caddy for searching and started self-hosting an email server. However, I've come to realize that pedantic privacy is a waste of time. It's good to have, but not to obsess over. Privacy is a spectrum, as Eric Murphy articulates in this video.

[00:07:26]And the more privacy you have, the more time it costs you.

[00:07:31]Three years after my absence, I posted a new video where I showed off my minimal website redesign, no bloatware, only a 90s aesthetic. Actually, 90s aesthetic is too much bloat. Much better.

[00:07:44]And well, the rest is history.