The beginning of my coding journey was like a rollercoaster.

Under the information age, I was born in a normal family in Hong Kong. My family bought a computer when I was around 6 years old.

At the start, I wander on the World Wide Web like an ordinary teenager. Everything was completely new to me, I didn't have to muster the will to try something new.

IOs Games were quite popular back in time, I still remember I was having a lot of fun playing moomoo.io all day. To "have more fun", I learned to use scripts downloaded from Tampermonkey, and managed to do some "hacks" using these scripts.

By coincidence, it was the first time I reached the boundary of programming, although I didn't get into it. The 6 years old me gave up on trying to understand the script written in JavaScript (I didn't even know what a programming language is). Coercing my brain to understand them apparently won't make me another Linus Torvalds or a genius computer nerd.

I cannot recall much about what I did on the Internet back in my childhood, but I was able to feel the vibrant world of computer. Looking backward, this probably built my fundamentals as a developer.

During my primary school, around P.5, I was a big fan of Sandbox games. A wonderful way to hang out online, and most importantly, have no stress and concept of rankings.

Back in the day, one sandbox game I was playing called Ultimate Sandbox, had became a target of game modding (aka. hacking). In the 1.9.9 version, there were lots of hackers using the modded version of the game downloaded online.

I had no concept about game modding and using hacks, literally a shameless kid.

I soon realised the fun of playing with these hacks, and became one of them. Upon testing my new downloaded hacks, somebody joined the chat room and sent a few suspicious download links. It turns out to be a fancy hack XMOD modded by somebody called Godzhacker. The mod was super powerful, with lots of different features that brought even more surprises than the boring game.

The mod itself also comes with a backdoor that allows the modder (Godzhacker) to ban mod users forever, meaning that people who use XMOD can be banned from using the mod. Banned users can no longer open the game, it was almost impossible to bypass that. With my previous Chinese friends, we tackled the problem by deleting a file hidden under the app directory.

I was wondering that if I somehow modified the mod, perhaps I could also ban the other users. Reaching out to a game modder, he told me he was using Dnspy, a software that decompiles .DLL files to mod Unity games. (Note: This method is no longer useful due to IL2CPP).

Under immense testing, I successfully found the correct file Assembly-CSharp.dll and learned to mod Unity games without any tutorials. I had no knowledge about C#, the decompiled programming language. And I learned it by observing the code, change it, then observe the changes.

This strategy worked very well, I made my first mod based on XMOD. Predictably, after playing with my mods, I felt unsatisfied and wanted to do something cooler, like adding new weapons.

It took me another year, trying to unpack the entire APK back to an Unity project. In my primary school, I was an immoral, unintelligent, shameless student, so I relied and pirated the tools online.

It was a great success using DevX-Unpacker, after replacing the broken C# scripts with decompiled DLL files from Dnspy, I got the original working Unity project. I learned to use Unity like an ordinary Game Developer, with the former code written by the developer of the game, I added a few weapons, vehicles and skins.

Lacking the required software and relevent knowledge, I used the marketplace of Untiy and added a few maps to the game itself.

From modeling to rigging, I stepped into the world of game development.

My Game Developer career was extremely short-living, because I realized it's incredibly tough and difficult. I was totally unqualified as somebody with zero fundamentals, my calibre as a game developer was too low.

I tried UE4, learned some C++ which isn't hard as a C# dev + game modder. As an experimental project, I made a little car racing game with Blender + UE4. Things are working, and I've also felt the heavy work and efforts to make a game.

Unfortunately, I didn't become an expert in the intricacies of game development. Perhaps it isn't a suitable path for me.

I start to feel interested to write some code.

The first thing I made is a C# WinForm app, Windows was my primary OS and their developer toolkit had provided everything I need.

Lately, I developed a few UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps but have no idea what to build next.

I was scrolling StackOverflow, and discovered a programming language that looks so close to C#. It is Java, a popular programming language.

I didn't even spend time learning C# and other programming languages, as I thought I've mastered them by just reading and modifying the code. So I started to take coding seriously, learning from the basics of Java. Meanwhile, I made backend projects with Spring Boot, learned to open source my projects on GitHub.

Java was so wide-used that I made Android apps, web services, Discord bots, and backends with purely Java. Probably influenced by JetBrains, the company that makes my favourite Java IDE Intellij, I also learned Kotlin and immediately caught by its beautiful and elegant syntax.

I published a few libraries written in Kotlin.

• JDAK, a framework for Discord Bot application commands (for JDA).
• Discord UI, a library to render and handle states of Discord Message Components (for JDA).
• BJDA, a wrapper of JDA with powerful functionalities like message components (for JDA).

An idea jumped into my mind, how about Minecraft mods?

Minecraft Forge lacks of a comprehensive documentation about game modding because most types information were decompiled from JAR files. They were no longer human readable. I tried to develop Mine UI, a mod that implements some common UI components. However, I stopped the project as I lost my interest to continue the development.

To practice my Java skills, I wanted to build a chat app. It was around 2017, I wasn't familiar with Web Development so I picked Java Swing for the frontend.

The project is open sourced, you can find the repository on GitHub.

Months later, I learned JavaScript, adopted new technologies including React.js and Vite. Omagize was developed as a successor to U3, my previous Java chat app. The app uses a backend written in Kotlin, and the frontend is completely developed in Typescript. It has a more eye-catching, impressive UI which was difficult to make in Java Swing.

I felt how convenient and universal the tech stack is. TypeScript could literally be used everywhere, even in a place that it doesn't belong to.

I swifted my focus to Web Development, developing my Discord bot dashboard templates on GitHub and gained some followers. It was also the period of time I learned Next.js, Vue.js and many other useful things.

My video demo of the dashboard was also a success.

By then, I met Yeecord in 2023, a Discord bot developed by a Taiwan student. It was my first time to contribute to an open source project, I migrated their docs site to Nextra. (Although it is now using my Fumadocs)

I developed my frontend skills very fast, almost all my time goes into my web development side projects. Shark Chat was developed as a successor to Omagize, leveraging Cloud services to ameliorate the problem of slow respond, due to the lack of performance optimizations of Omagize.

Omagize has a backend developed in Kotlin, the implementation of realtime notification system was rough and poorly designed. It was just a centralized WebSocket server between clients which can be buggy under poor internet connection. The backend was no longer hosted as the project ends in 2023.

Shark Chat is still available on Web, with a repository on GitHub.

Today is 2024, I made Fuma Comment, Fumadocs, and many other projects. They are all my treasures, I've spent immense time to make them better.

Fumadocs has reached 1,000 stars on GitHub in 2024, July 23. A very great achievement to me. Vercel sent me some cool Next.js swags, I really love the nice water bottle. ;)

What is next? Perhaps I'll contribute to more open-source projects.