Before GitHub

I taught myself to program before I had anywhere to put the code. When I finally made an account, the first thing I uploaded was eighteen files I still had only because they happened to be sitting in OneDrive.

Almost all of it was written to take a chore off somebody. A calculator for working out my GPA. A timetable generator, and then a second timetable generator, because I had forgotten I already wrote one. A script that turns ordinary text into the alternating upper and lower case people use for sarcasm in messages. Something that reads back saved WiFi passwords, which I found on an Instagram post and copied because it looked fun, and which I said so about in the file rather than letting anyone think I had come up with it.

The rest were games. Hangman, tic tac toe, rock paper scissors, and Ludo, which I wrote because Ludo is the game my family actually plays. Every one of them ends by waiting for a keypress, so a friend could double click the file and not have the window vanish before they saw anything.

Two of the problems in that folder are solved twice, side by side, because I did not remember solving them the first time. I kept both. I did not know yet that this was going to be how I work: start again rather than repair, and leave the earlier attempt where I can still see it.

The README I wrote for it says the code is not optimised and may not run. That is still true. It is here as evidence, not as a portfolio piece.