How I got into developing software

My interest for IT development started at the age of 14, when I was playing an online text-based game. In my school a lot children where playing this game, so in school being the best at this game really meant something. Seeing such enthusiasm and competition around a game got my attention. I had my own ideas for what should be possible in such a game and with that got interested in building one myself. At my 15th birthday I received a book about PHP as a birthday gift from my parents. From there a new hobby was born.

In my first years of learning about developing websites, I started building a text-based game. It was called StreetKill. I can’t remember how I came up with the name, but the main theme was about being a “gangster”. Each player had their own game character with a money balance, experience level and strength. In the best days of the game, there where like a minimal of continually 10-20 people playing throughout the day.
As I was still a novice webdeveloper, I learned a lot the hard way.. Things like: accidentally removing production data while developing, XSS and CSRF attacks, bots that automatically played the game all crossed my path.

After secondary school I started studying Informatics at the Hague University. Due to a lack of time, StreetKill came to a slow stop in this period. The game went offline somewhere in 2011.

screenshot of how StreetKill looked in 2011