my friend, stefan, shared this screenshot with me a while back which got me started on thinking about my journey in this industry. i've been thinking about the sure fire way to write this for a while now without seeming too pretentious or showcasing too much of the amount of privilege i have in this world. essentially, i hope to talk about myself and be humble as i do it. people who know me in real life know that i dislike talking about myself or drawing attention to myself. i'm perfectly comfortable in the background. that's how i work.
i always tell people i never really intended on going into tech. honestly. according to my life plan in highschool, i should be in grad school right now studying architecture. why architecture? because buildings are cool as heck. but now that i'm a bit older, i realize that "going into" isn't the same as "falling completely."
to start, i gotta take it back. way way back to june 2011. i had been "making" games here and there for a little while. i think it was around a year or two. i remember joining a facebook group for a game framework i was using and i asked the question if there were any other teens in the group. that's how i met patrik. a kid from sweden who also liked to make games. patrik and i became friends pretty quick and he had the idea that "hey, i bet there are more kids like us who like writing games and like making things so why not reach out to them."
playtesting a game i made back in high school
that's how teendev was born. i remember posting it in some game dev groups i was in, dreamincode, and some other places and hoping people would join. we had i think 10 members after the first month or so? people trickled in here and there over time though. but even though there were ~10 of us, we had kids from north & south america and europe. the group very much started out with mostly game developers but overtime due to network effects, people started adding other kids they knew and on and on and on and on. and that's the thing about making your network/group diverse from the jump. it still annoys me that people in tech especially the startup world don't really seem to get it. diversity in tech isn't much of a pipeline problem. it's just that their network isn't as diverse and that's an incredibly sad thing if you think about it. thought leaders in tech write as if they are so sure of the world but have friends that are mostly the same gender as themselves, look like themselves, talk like themselves, and think like themselves. it's a giant echo-chamber.
on that topic. after about 3 years of existing, teendev had grown from 150 members from all over the globe. we were finally getting our first members from africa and asia too! but then i learned what a "hackathon" was. this was because there was another group called "hshackers" ,that was created originally for highschool attendees who were going to a hackathon at UPenn called PennApps. while teendev was a representation of the globe, hshackers was largely american but someone proposed a "merger" between the two groups because they "served" similar functions. you know what's crazy, during this "merger," no one contacted me or told me anything until i chose to step in. members of this other group saw a smaller group and just wanted us to assimilate... or at least that's how i viewed it back then. eventually, we went our different ways because teendev was for all teenage coders. not just "hackers" or people who go to hackathons. but due to this beef, our group exploded from 150 members to 1k within 6 months.
went from 150 to 1k members in 6 months.
it wasn't all bad looking back on it. it was how i met zach who now runs hack club and is doing what i always imagined teendev to be in real life. and hack club is global! what i really loved about teendev was that because we were all kinda in the same boat, there was no animosity no matter what the situation. we were all just kicking it and having fun. if a group could embody the term "be like water" in my short life so far, it would be teendev back in its heyday. we all just went with the flow.