How I Started Coding at Age 9 Using Flash and ActionScript

I got my start on the early social web: Friendster and MySpace. You had to tweak HTML and CSS to make your profile look right, and that little bit of code pulled a lot of us in. At nine I found Flash and ActionScript. It was one tool where you could make animations, tiny games, even full sites. There wasn’t much online, so I grabbed a couple of books and wrote simple scripts: click a button, jump to frame 50, play that part. It barely felt like programming, but it was code, and it made building things feel visual and doable. That mix of art and interactivity hooked me on software, and I never really let go.