Best $26.95 ever spent

Minecraft. It's Minecraft.

I wouldn't call myself much of a gamer, but the single game that fueled my grade school experience was Minecraft. In fact, I attribute this game as the most significant influence in figuring out my desired future career.

For context, Minecraft is a sandbox game set in an infinite world limited by one's own creativity. I mean it. But, my bread and butter wasn't the “vanilla” (i.e. default play style) game. Rather, most of my time was spent in minigames with friends or other folks online.

hacker noises I'm in…

One of the earliest games that my friends and I dove into was called Factions. The aim of the game was to form a group (i.e. a faction) of loyal members, build and defend a home base, and try to find and loot neighboring factions. These battles could often span hours, and building a properly defended base could take several days. The hook for me was the wildly creative thinking required across the game. From finding exploits in the economy to building creative traps for enemies to learning obscure game mechanics in order to covertly sneak into an enemy's base. I had assembled a toolkit and expertise in creative means of infiltration, and as I improved, the benefits were immediate and palpable.

As a developer, I am still after the same thrill as when I would sneak into an enemy's base. The web has an incredible number of exploits, and I find myself falling into similar thought patterns as I develop and configure my applications. This game taught me the value of thinking like a bad actor.

Redstone ❤️

Next, I took a break from the rush of factions and switched to a slower game mode - survival multiplayer. This mode doesn't have a particular goal. It's a more social community with player-run shops, events, games, and more. The key was that there weren't any third-party game modifications to enable shops – everything had to be done exclusively with items found in the default version of the game. Minecraft has a resource called “redstone,” an ore that is essentially analogous to wiring in computer engineering. I soon began experimenting with building small gadgets with redstone, then building automated shop modules, then licensing my redstone designs to other players. I ran a very successful shopping mall, all fueled by custom-made redstone creations.

I think the parallel here is quite clear. But, looking past the hard skills of AND or NOT gates, this also taught me a great deal about what I want from a career. It's not enough to be okay at many things – the key to generating value is specialization. Be an expert in your area, and become the person people come to for help.

Developer-lite

Last, some friends and I started our own server. We were hosting these games now, and as an administrator, I unlocked a new toy; command blocks. A command block is a means of executing game commands through the redstone circuitry framework. So, now you can automate any administrator commands; summon creatures, teleport players, change the weather, etc. I recall getting frustrated with some recurrent server maintenance tasks, and writing my first pseudo-Bash script using these blocks. I'd also explore some other creations and browse through massive pastebin files to try and learn the “cutting edge” of command block automation creations.

Looking back, programming seems like a natural next step given my in-game interests. Even if I hadn't written a line of “real” code, I was building some of the required soft-skills; getting frustrated with repetition and angrily writing an automation script, and endlessly scrolling through barely coherent documentation.