Who am I?

Web Development

I’d say my web development journey began right before I truly understood that you could create your own games. The first things that really got me started were HTML and CSS—plus C# on the side, though I had been using that a bit before diving into the web, so I’ll set it aside for now since this section is focused on web development.

Starting out with web was a whole different world for me at the time, but it really pushed me to understand how to organize projects with lots of interconnected files. (With C#, I hadn’t yet grasped OOP.)

My first real code editor wasn’t Visual Studio Code or anything in the terminal—it was the humble Brackets Code Editor. It felt good at the time—or at least I thought so, since I didn’t know much else beyond Visual Studio for C#.

It probably took me about a year to get the hang of HTML and CSS, with a little bit of JavaScript, before I discovered the magical concept of using other people’s code to help with your own ⭐Libraries⭐. The one that helped my 12-year-old brain the most was Bootstrap, even though it took me a while to understand. (Little did I know I’d fall in love with Tailwind years later.)

As time went on, I kept self-learning by reading the code of published libraries and searching for things I didn’t understand. I’d try to mimic how those "wizards" wrote their code while adding my own ideas. Eventually, I took a break from web development and went through a little obsession with software in general—I’ll call that my software phase.

After that phase, when I came back to web, I kept building small projects—some I abandoned, some I didn’t. They were just random ideas: maybe trying to recreate Facebook using only HTML and CSS, or learning Node.js for the first time.

ExpressJS & My Love for the Backend

Discovering ExpressJS is what KICKED OFF my love for backend programming. Up until that point, I was almost entirely focused on frontend tech.

At first, just making a web server to serve an index.html file made me happy. But that quickly became a rabbit hole—one where I learned how to implement authentication, connect external databases to an Express server, and, for the first time, see how frontend code could be compiled at runtime using something like PugJS. That absolutely blew my mind.

With this new knowledge, I started cranking out simple full-stack projects by combining what I already knew from the frontend.

Then, as usual, another software phase hit and I stepped away from web again. But when I came back, I felt like I needed to learn newer tech. I had this feeling that the tools I already knew weren’t enough—mostly because of the noisy, toxic culture around web dev where a new framework seemed to come out every other week.

It bothered me a little… until I realized it really doesn’t matter. You could build a great website with PHP if you wanted to. What matters is building, not chasing trends.

The Web Tech Rush

So… what will you pick? React, Vue, or Angular?

I didn’t know either—until I finally landed on React, after months of trying this and that.

Down the road, I picked up Tailwind (which I loved) and Redux for state management. At that point, I could confidently say:
“Yeah, I know how to make websites.”

(And don’t even get me started on how long it took me to understand Redux. Once I did, I loved it—for a while. But then I started to hate how much boilerplate it required just to get a new project going.)

Software Development

I started off with really simple C#, using WinForms at the time. It gave me my first real experience of running a desktop application—with my own code behind it.

Back then, I didn’t realize just how much was going on behind the scenes just to render that window or display all the controls I was adding. I tried messing around with how controls were drawn and how windows worked, but quickly decided it was too difficult for me. (Foreshadowing?)

Not long after that, I began to understand object-oriented programming, which allowed me to write more complex C# applications—still using WinForms. But I wanted to venture out a bit.

And that’s when I found one of my favorite languages to this day: C, and its fancier sibling, C++.

At first, I preferred C++—probably because I had just wrapped my head around OOP and was excited to keep using those patterns. But over time, and after working with libraries written purely in C, I started to appreciate the simplicity and elegance of C even more. No OOP overhead, just clean, powerful code.

While working with C++, I started wondering how to mix and match languages—for example, “How do I use C++ with C#?” That curiosity helped me realize that, until then, I had mostly been working with interpreted languages like Java, C#, and Python. Learning about the compiled nature of C and C++ broadened my understanding of how versatile and layered programming can be.

Somewhere along the way, I got hooked on reverse engineering. I wanted to understand how to tinker with the games I played—how people were injecting their own DLLs into games, rendering custom overlays and trainers using DirectX or OpenGL, and building UI with tools like ImGui.

That opened up a whole new world—and I realized I had to finally confront my fear of graphics programming and rendering. I wanted to do the cool stuff, too.

For the longest time, I just messed around with OpenGL, trying to understand how graphics cards handle rendering. That led to a new obsession: trying to make my own game engine.

...It didn’t go well.

The project was just too time-consuming for me at the time, and I eventually moved on. But I learned a lot from the process—and it planted seeds I still come back to now and then.

Game Development

For the longest time—while learning all sorts of fun things in software and web development—I always held on to my love for creating games, often trying to mash that passion together with whatever other project I was working on.

I started primarily on Roblox, since it offered a simple-enough game engine for me at the time, and it’s where most of my friends were.
More friends = more people to share projects with = more enjoyment from coding games.

So learning Lua—or more specifically, Luau (Roblox’s version of Lua with added type safety)—was a must. I started out making simple obbies, race tracks, and other mini-games where I’d stay up all night with my friends racing cars, messing around with admin commands...
Some of the most fun I’ve ever had.

Eventually, I created my first "real" game—a small soccer game—which surprisingly grew to a Discord server with over 300 players. It was super enjoyable to manage, especially because soccer was something I loved playing in real life, too.

After that project ended—due to a fallout with a close friend—I took a small break. That’s when I became curious about other engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. Unity was the obvious choice for me at the time: my PC would've exploded if I even thought about launching Unreal, and Unity felt more familiar since it used C#.

But not long after exploring Unity, I realized just how many amazing features Roblox provides out of the box, like:

1. Built-in networking

2. Easy monetization

3. A simple and well-documented API

And I thought to myself: “I’m not ready to tackle all that boilerplate on my own just yet.”
So I went back to Roblox—and began working on personal passion projects again. Eventually, I reached the point where I started offering my skills for hire.

As I began taking Roblox development more seriously, I dove into learning best practices and keeping up with platform updates. Over time, I started noticing more professional developers entering the space—many with backgrounds in fields like web development—and they brought with them familiar concepts like:

Using frameworks to handle RemoteEvents and RemoteFunctions in the background

Cleaner architectural patterns and abstractions

Modular codebases and dependency management

And just when things couldn’t get more exciting, Roblox themselves released Roact—their own version of React for UI. Naturally, I loved it.

But... I always had a bit of a distaste for Luau. It bugged me how barebones Lua felt compared to the other languages I had learned. That’s not a knock on Lua—it’s a scripting language, not a full-blown programming language, so it wasn’t a fair comparison. But still... I wished there was something better.

Then, roblox-ts came into my life.

Essentially a TypeScript-to-Luau transpiler, roblox-ts let me write Roblox games in TypeScript, locally on my machine, using VSCode, with Rojo to sync changes directly into Studio.
It was exactly the workflow I’d been dreaming of.

Even better, roblox-ts allowed you to write your own type definitions for any existing Luau code, and it would automatically integrate those types right into your TypeScript codebase.

It was clean, powerful, and finally made Roblox development feel like it fit naturally into my broader software development workflow.

Where am I now?