Four years ago, I was in high school learning JavaScript and HTML. Spring break happened, and I started looking more into programming. On March 6th, 2020, I started a new Neocities website, calling it e4494s after a weird play on the word "errors." I had no idea how much this decision would impact my future.
I made some basic pages following the tutorials in S2JS; the first "working" page I ever made was catcher.html, and then the first time I created my OWN project, without just blindy following a tutorial, was bounce.html (my beloved). I was so proud showing off what I'd learned and how many spheres you could have bouncing around.
I was so excited to show my computer science teacher what I'd learned, and waited for school to come back after they delayed spring break by a week (something about some virus?). Then they delayed it by 2 weeks. Then they announced there would be no classes until next year. This was right around the time the entire world shut down.
The next few months I ended up dedicating a lot of my time to learning more about coding my little website. I spent hours a day on it, investing hundreds of hours over the course of the quarantine. e4494s became my pride and joy, and I loved watching the Neocities view counter slowly tick up as random people I'd never met somehow found my random little website.
I made cellular automata. I experimented with physics. I did whatever random thing came to mind, because suddenly I understood coding, and the world was my oyster. Anything I could imagine, I could code. I played around with math, fractals, art, I made hundreds of random spur-of-the-moment, stream-of-consciousness programs, and so on. This was the best time of my life, when I finally knew I was where I was meant to be. Nothing clicked as well or was as captivating to me as programming.
As the years have gone on since I founded e4494s, things have changed a lot. I'm in college now, even studying computer science like I'd always wanted to. I'm significantly less active in adding new things to the website; even this blog post was the first change in a few months. I went from creating a new page every day to maybe doing so once a month. School got harder, life got more real, and other things took priority over adding to e4494s.
But I never forgot this site, and I never will. This isn't goodbye; I'm still going to keep updating this website and adding random things to it whenever I have an idea I want to play around with. e4494s, my first website, will always have a special place in my heart as my computer science career continues. I've competed in international hack-a-thons and developed real-world projects for missions organizations, but this website was where it all started. It's where computer science went from a frustrating subject in high school to a something I could appreciate and see the beauty in. e4494s was my was my first outlet for enjoying computer science and practicing what I'd learned and loved, and it has grown with me in the years since its inception.
I want to give a huge thanks to anyone who has supported this website, whether through comments, emails, or just simply viewing it. That's what I created this website for - to be enjoyed. It's why I'll never ask for donations or plaster ads on the homepage. e4494s doesn't exist to fill my wallet. It exists to showcase my love of programming, demonstrate the capabilities of the subject, and hopefully inspire others to see the beauty and the fun in it, and try their own hand at coding. This website exists to be enjoyed and waste time on. Here's to fledgling coders!
~ e4494s
