My experience of entering university as a developer

My hacking experience dates back to when I was 11 years old.

I first encountered computer code when I was playing Runescape, this was in 2008.

Runescape is a notoriously slow game, so people would take the game assets and build their own servers in Java where items were cheap and skilling was easy.

I joined these servers and met a lot of people, but I wanted to have my own community of friends, so I downloaded some private server code and ran it myself on my computer.

People on internet forums would give advice on how to modify the server game modes, customise it and etc. I tried it myself and made a few small changes to some text, nothing else.

I watched some YouTube tutorials on how to write microsoft batch scripts (.bat) which would run commands in the windows command prmopt (cmd), as the servers used batch files to launch the clients, sometimes they'd need configuring to different folders or whatever else.

It got to the stage where I could make hangman games with text, guessing games, other sorts of fun puzzles, but it was never serious programming.

Someone caught wind of it, and word got around, someone I went to church with called Clint was a C# developer, he gave me his old Java and Visual Basic text books.

I downloaded Microsoft Visual Studio and started studying them. I understood basic concepts, variables, strings, functions, but a lot of it was out of my grasp to teach myself at such a young age.

I remember draggnig and dropping Visual Basic UI elements and uploading a video of my app to YouTube and getting upset when no one watched it, apparently no one cared about my app with 1 button and a pop up.

The concept of modding games stuck with me, and I would return to it frequently.

When I was 14 years old, I had a Playstation 3, the concept of a "modded lobby" would come around. It was the same idea as a runescape private server, people would inject their own scripts and make the game easier. I searched around online, and followed a tutorial and modified mine, I won the respect of my peers and was welcomed into a gaming forum of hackers.

I was frustrated that a lot of the scripts never worked or had clear instructions, so I analysed them all and made my own. I called it the SSyntaxErr patch (from my calculator that would throw errors at me, but misspelling on purpose).

I posted the script online for our community, and someone leaked it. The script ended up getting thousands of downloads, and over 11 pages of forum feedback across various sites from people discussing it.

In the next few years, Kevin Rudd would design a program to give every student a free laptop for school. I received one of these laptops, they were heavily locked down, you couldn't run anything or access any website which was considered non-educational. I thought this was a challenge, if I couldn't use it, then I'd just swap the harddrive out.

I went to the IT guy in our school, I told him I was going to bypass it, he told me it was impossible, but if I could do it then he'd offer me a candy bar as a reward.

First I tried to bypass the bios lock by removing the CMOS. I then found some information deep on the internet about how to bypass the administration restriction.

You would purposefully enter windows recovery mode from a startup or shutdown fault, then you'd open the diagnostics result in notepad. Once you have notepad open you can run Ctrl + O and navigate to system 32, inside system 32 you could launch cmd. The command prompt was opened with administration privileges. You then ran scripts to elevate your own user account privileges to administration.

After that I would spend my days playing games in class, running any .exe file and installing steam.

I had a teacher who was really impressed with my operational skills. She sent me to the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (aie) as part of a work experience for students to gain knowledge in game development and coding.

Later I went on to build my own gaming PC. The itch for private server hadn't ended, so for my birthday I bought some IBM dual xeon servers from eBay and had them freight shipped to my bedroom. I had three 1U rack mount servers in my bedroom running Proxmox. Each linux instance had it's own configured ubuntu firewall (ufw) with port forwarding on my router and a static IPv4 address. We were running servers from Minecraft, to Counter Strike and Team Fortress.

I tried to study a TAFE TVET course while at school to learn IT, but it was quite boring for me. We focused mainly on installing operating systems and using Microsoft Word, something I thought was cake walk and didn't want to do.

I came back to TAFE when I was 21 and completed a Certificate IV in Computer Programming. My friends reached out to me and pulled me back into the gaming eco-system and told me about an idea to run more private servers.

They wanted me to be their developer, and I agreed. Within the first few months of starting a CERT IV we started a gaming community, but I didn't want this to be ordinary.

I started by trying to set up a forum using open source software, VBulletin was the status quo but was expensive, there was NodeBB but it wasn't flexible. I created my own forum software in a few weeks using MongoDB, EJS, Node and boostrap. I used MongoDB becuase I didn't know SQL yet, but understood JSON so it was easy for me.

The forum was integrated with the games this time, the experience online and offline was seemless, communication and statistics anywhere, if you were relaxing and organising or competeing for the top position.

This experience landed me my first job at ClockOn as a C# developer.

My manager was also a gamer and liked my projects, so I joined their company happily. I had ended up where I always wanted to be, coding and making things, hacking and understanding, etc.

The decisions my manager made in terms of creating the software I was working on were questionable from my persepective, he chose previous stability and reputation rather than something that was modern and maintained.

My mananger had never worked on a web application and he worked full time on the windows app, so he and I would butt heads about web design choices such as web accessibility, cross platform development, responsiveness.

It was my job to rewrite the entire application from Delphi to C#.

I was on a 6 month probationary period, I was being paid $20 an hour to work part time as a developer. I felt like $20 was low, tram drivers and truck drivers get paid $45 an hour. I wasn't expecting that immediately, but from my market research at the time a company will never give you a raise above 15%. I was told after my probationary period I would receive a raise.

From the feedback we were getting from customers calling in daily, cross comptability with multiple devices and operating systems was a real pain ponit for them, we we were losing customers.

After 9 months of working there my probation was already over and I had received no raise, so I put in my notice to quit. Before I quit I tried to improve their software by implementing and experimenting with stateful and reactive components using Vue.js, which increased my own development speed and web page responsiveness and accessibility, also decreasing page bundle size (improving page loading speed).

In retrospect, the greivences I had were small and I could have worked with the technology and the team were nice, the main contributing factor to my depature was the lack of liveable salary, a year or two later the government would introduce a minimum award rate which was higher than what I was being paid, I think what I was being paid was below what one might consider minimum wage in any other field.

I also considered in this evaulation the massive move in the industry towards react. Every company that was serious about having a website going into the 2020s was making it a progressive single page web app. The new frameworks were popular for a reason: the reduced development time, increased engineer satisifcation, modernised tooling and extended core browser functionality beyond what the standard web specification ever intended. The group isn't always right, and someone groups are a sign of madness, but in this case the industry has moved far beyond ever using jQuery or Blazor and if you weren't using React or a similar library for a website today people would assume you had no idea what you were doing.

So I spent every waking free hour I had learning every modern web framework and comparing them to figure out how to improve the software I was building and future proof myself.

My manager probably didn't want to stop my career from progressing, but given my difficult financial situation I had to leave.

I moved to Sydney and enrolled to study part time Certificate IV in Cyber Security after business hours so I could work full time as a web developer at some company in the city, but just a few weeks after I moved to the city COVID-19 became a global pandemic.

Hiring became difficult, people were focusing on moving from work to home, taking on a junior during this period became unmanagable. I finished my ceriticate IV and my TAFE teacher convinced me to go to unviesrity.

I wanted to learn how to master artifical intelligence, and I knew I needed maths, so I decided to do an engineering bachelors, learning half circuit boards and half AI, so I could complete my hacking trinity of software, hardware and intelligence.

I saw the University of Technology offered double degrees, I always enjoyed maths, so I wanted to study physics, but after hearing horror stories of advanced physics classes I became fearful and decided not to do it, but in my mind I had already comitted to a doubled degree.

I chose a double bachelors, of Engineering (Honours) and Medical Science, mainly becuase I was interersted in how the brain worked.

During my first semester I was reached out to by a previous school mate, he had been asked to join a startup but didn't have the time, he threw me a referral and I joined the team.

I was their lead backend developer, there was one other guy who was a front-end developer, we had no salary and were being paid in equity - I received a 14% stake in the company for taking the lead back-end and data role. He was good at React, which I had also learnt but never used in a real project, but his weakness was backends and data pipelines.

I drew up a design, I architected a system on AWS because every statup who took themselves seriously used AWS. I designed the backend to use GraphQL which was popular at the time becuase it allowed large teams to easily create dynamic APIs (it has since faded out of popularity for good reasons despite how much I do like it, mainly it comes down to it's long tern maintability difficulties, a lot of people just give up and go back to /v1/ and /v2/ REST points), and a SQL database using Node.JS as the intermediate layer. After struggling to get AWS to work with a week of work without it billing random charges and keeping unused processes running I switched to Google Cloud and had total control and a running system in under a day.

In about 6 to 10 months we had a working minimum viable product. We showed it to the external stakeholders who were impressed and wanted to see more, but after months of searching for investors to compensate our salaries we couldn't find anyone and decided to call it quits just shy of a year of development. It consumed me entirely for months, I spent every spare moment writing code for our startup.

I learnt a lot about API security and what it means to haver a user account and have it access restricted (trusted) data. I became good at settuping up express with the standard cors, https, etc. I also set up a github action pipeline for CI/CD to deploy our code to Google Cloud where it was hosted on App Engine, along with our database on a seperate service.

At this stage, I stil had no job offers, I had kind of sidelined IT due to the startup but was still checking my emails for offers and considering them seriously, but after no luck with interviews for a few weeks I found a job in hospitality to pay my bills.

The resturant then shut down temproarily, I was told I would have a job when it was back open but after talking to all my previousl colleagues we were all fired and replaced with new people.

I focused on studying, I was dirt poor, I decided to do all my medical science subjects first and then go to engineering and find a job where I was most comfortable.

During a medical science lecture I heard a professor talk about how a lot of anti-depressants give side effects due to genetic variances between indivduals. I thought this was a problem I could probably help with in a startup sense.

I knew there were websites that created family trees of people, and websites that did DNA tests, but none that really did both well. So I had an idea to create a merger of the two domains, a website that had family trees with DNA filled out that showed you complete drug reactions based on genetic information throughout your family.

I called it medicamina which was some latin word for drugs, somenoe in melbourne would later take the name for a biomedical company after I had already registered as a company.

I started it using flutter this time, I tried react native for cross platform support but found it lacking in usability, it wasn't just compatible with React, it really was something else that needed configuring. Flutter offered an easy compilation as an alternative.

I used the same backend architecture that I loved, Node with TypeScript and SQL, hosted on Microsoft Azure and the front-end hosted on Google Firebase (which is easily compatible with flutter).

I worked on this for almost two years part time, then I went to investors but no one was interseted, so I archived the project. Another startup months later with a similar idea of personalised medicine insights would raise 6 million AUD, congratulations to them.

During this time, I also did some freelance work for companies in the city, doing short 2 or 1 day modifications of websites for $50 an hour.

After this I picked up vibe-coding. My first project was a wikipedia alternative called Alternipedia, a project that was designed to not be profitable, but as a community information system.

Alternipedia was a project I completed in about two weeks, it took multiple different community edited perspectives and displayed them to allow the user to decide which political opinion they liked the most.

I used Next.JS for this (hosted on Vercel), with a Supabase (postgreSQL) backend. I love this stack combo, Next.JS is a dream for developing, it's seemless, quick, easy to understand. I have no complaints.

After this project flopped, and because Elon Musk released Grokipedia (A conservative alternative to wikipedia) I decided to let them take the wheel and people can decide on their own which platforms to use.

During my studies I also contributed to a couple of open-source projects. I created a plugin for Visual Studio Code which has accumulated 800 downloads on Microsoft's marketplace and a 5 star review, and a pull request to fix broken firmware in the Anycubic rinkhals firmware, the story of the reason why I developed these can be viewed in my blog post here.

Now I'm in my final year of university, and I haven't had paid part-time or full-time development work in over 6 years. I've tried, I've sent hunderds of applications, but the market has changed so many times so rapidly that I've struggled to re-enter and gain stability within it. It hurts me because I've missed real opportunties to gain a reputation as a good developer within Sydney, but I haven't been sitting idle. I've learnt every free moment I have, alongside my unviersity cirriculum to become good at what I do. It started before a career and it will end after a career.

What I've been doing to support myself is working casually in kitchens. First at Frango's Charcoal Chicken in Petersham as a waiter. I worked there until the store was shut down. One challenging aspect of that job was all of the staff and community were mainly portugese speaking, so in my lunch break I would study Portguese and learnt basic phrases, like cod-fish, chicken skewer, chips so I could better communicate to customers and staff. The next hospitality role has been in a burger resturant, where I've been voted as the most favoured team mate for new staff to work with multipe times, and I've been promoted to a team leader and trainer. I'm desperate to get onto the career ladder and make progression towards something sustainable for my family.

I've struggled to understand why my resume doesn't get many interviews, I've had two which were both unsuccesful, one becuase I apparently lack passion for technical details. I believe I'm as passionate as anyone else about computer engineering, more passionate than someone non-technical in a 10 minute interview might be able to grasp.

It may be the job market, I've spoken to engineers with experience who have spent 12 months out of a job, some students with 300 applications sent and no interviews, some software engineer graduates working at a bath and body shop, and a friend who was laid off and replaced with Claude code. It's a heart crushing market. It's so difficult for me to find companies that look like they offer secure employment, but then again even if it isn't I wonder if I should risk instability for resume gap filling (taking an instable and insecure job to make my resume look better). I've never met a developer who has said finding a job in Sydney is easy or reasonable.