Origins: The First Line of Code

Every story has an origin. Mine started in a dusty library computer room in 2012.

I was looking at a monitor that displayed a blue screen with a menu. The application was QBasic. A kind librarian had printed out a tutorial for me.

PRINT "Hello, World!"
INPUT "What is your name? ", name$
PRINT "Hello, "; name$; "! Welcome to programming."

When I pressed F5 to run it, and saw the text appear, my brain clicked. I was no longer a consumer of technology. I was a creator.

This is the first episode in a series documenting how I went from writing basic QBasic print statements to building complex full-stack web applications.