I started programming on January 3, 2018, after my friend mentioned he was working on a batch script to convert Minecraft texture packs. Programming had always fascinated me, but it seemed like a daunting field to get into. Curious, I searched online for the best beginner-friendly language and came across Python. I decided to give it a try. After a few months, I could create basic programs and had even built a few small games, like Tic-Tac-Toe. My first version of Tic-Tac-Toe was a mess—it had 650 lines of repetitive code because I didn’t yet understand functions, let alone classes. Once I learned about functions, I was able to reduce it to 250 lines. A year later, I revisited the project and optimized it down to just 48 lines. While line count isn’t everything, in this case, it reflected how much I had improved. The more I learned, the more I enjoyed programming. Around November or December of 2018, I started experimenting with Rust. I was drawn to it because of its package manager, Cargo, which made managing dependencies so much easier. For practice, I built a Matrix Rain clone. It wasn’t great since I was still figuring out Rust, but I was learning. I went on to create a Game of Life simulation and a few other small projects. A few years later, I was looking for a bigger challenge—something I could build that would actually be useful to me. As a programmer, I used a text editor every day, which got me thinking: *What if I built my own?* At the time, I was in love with Vim, so I decided to create a Vim-like editor in Rust. It was an ambitious project, but it led me down a fascinating rabbit hole. I started exploring how Vim plugins worked, which eventually made me curious about how programming languages themselves were designed. That curiosity turned into a full-blown obsession.