It actually started as a high school project and became a bigger project for when I started interviewing for internships in college. The high school project was to make a game and we were encouraged to use Java GUI libraries so I made the classic snake game. It had static frame rates, many bugs, out of bound issues, and many violations of OOP, but it was more than what was expected. I kept it around in a local hard-drive and when I started my undergrad, I realized I needed to make a github and start some projects. I initially wanted to just add a repo for the current code I had but it wasn’t really well written…

So I decided to abstract it. The more I abstracted it, the more I realized I was moving towards a game engine. Eventually I took a pause but I got an SDE intership interview that wanted me to present a project so I crunched JEngine during my winter break.

Certainly, out of curiosity did was there an API to the phpBB forum that you used to build the CMS?

Absolutely, I’m not sure if everyone else started out the same but I believe that’s what hooked me on programming: the autocracy of trying out a new idea just for the heck of it. I think I’m still yearning for that same level of freedom and moving my career towards a position with more independence.