From Discord Bots to Fullstack Dev
How running a Discord server and building a bot got me into web development.
Python in 10th grade
I wrote my first Python in 10th grade. After that I tried Android Studio with Java and made a few small apps, mostly to see how real apps were put together.
The bigger change came when I became an admin of a Discord server with over 45,000 members, owned by a YouTuber with 4M+ subscribers.
Learning on a big server
Running that server taught me a lot about how communities behave and how things break at scale. For example, what happens when 10,000 people ping the same bot at once (it's not great ðŸ˜).
With a few other developers I co-built Not Amy, a gaming bot that later got verified. That's where I first ran into APIs, rate limits and async code, before I knew the names for any of it.
Getting into web dev
From bots I moved to web development: JavaScript first, then Next.js, TypeScript and Node.js, which is still what I use most.
I didn't plan to become a fullstack developer. I kept wanting to build the next piece of whatever I was working on, and eventually that covered both ends.
