I'm Raayed, a high school sophomore interested in programming of all kinds. I used to program in Scratch and was active on the site as The_Cool_Scratch_Guy for quite a while. In the summer of 2024, I started learning the basic syntax of Python. By the summer of 2025, I knew enough Python to make some very basic games, but still not as well as I know Python today.
At this stage I still barely knew much real programming.
In the fall of 2025, I had joined a robotics club where everyone used Java, so I went ahead and learned Java just by looking up syntax and googling stuff - I was comfortable with it in about a month. In January of this year, I started making a game in Roblox Studio. I eventually quit Roblox entirely after hearing about how the company was doing basically nothing to keep children safe, but I did get to learn Lua because of it.
From January through March was the main robotics build season, and through working on the large codebase, I became familiar with using Git. After the robotics build season was over, Kotlin caught my eye. It quickly became my favorite programming language.
With so much backend potential and fairly crappy design skills, how did I end up making a website?
One day in my Chinese class, we had a free period and I sat with my friend Ali on a Go board. Neither of us were 1% good at Go. So instead we played Connect 5, but it got boring fast. We decided to mix it up with some rules from Go, and Connect Go was born.
Then, Ali suggested we should make a website based off of Connect Go. That lead to me learning web basics, a three-way collab on GitHub, and the creation of this website hosted on my own Raspberry Pi.