All of my coding programs in high school are dead by now. I didn’t renew the server subscription anymore, nor did I continue with maintenance or troubleshooting. The last website I shut down was the campus BBS. A bug had appeared, and with the already low user base, the backend management became chaotic. So I just decided to shut it down. Deep down I know that these projects were more about appearances. Perhaps when I initially came up with these ideas, I genuinely wanted to do something for the people at my high school, but over time, they gradually slipped into the “flexing zone.” They are allowed to be present in my high school life only because they enhanced the chance of my getting into CMU, and for every part of them, some unique abilities and qualities must be exposed to the Admissions Officers. The plan was clear: one project for software, one for hardware, and one for integration.
But I do remember that I was coding to create. I started learning my first programming language because I wanted to use the command block in Minecraft to build a puzzle map that would transport players and display scripts on the screen. One of my best friends was into redstone mechanics, data packets, and triggers at the time, so we kind of worked together. The addictive potential of coding lies in how each roadblock pushes you to learn something new, and soon I was hooked not just on Minecraft, but on the thrill of coding itself. I developed this strange drive not just to make things work, but to make them work well. The more I coded, the more I saw technical skills like debugging, optimization, and scalability as a form of creation. People say coding is an art, and in fact, everything becomes art when you’re focused on creating something.
Later in high school, the "how crowded is the cafeteria" queue project is probably the only one that had anything to do with “creativity,” but even then, it was just a data showcase platform, meant to “benefit the community,” and it only went live for two weeks. The teachers expressed concerns about underage privacy and camera safety because too many students were using the app, and they were worried that the camera footage from my Raspberry Pi might lead to issues that neither of us fully understood. I tried to reassure them by explaining how the data was processed locally, but after a day or two, I stopped defending myself—I genuinely didn’t care if the program continued running. I had already gathered all the materials I needed for my application. At that moment, no one, including myself, really cared whether my code was producing something interesting, let alone creating something. I quitted creating.