From Articles to Algorithms: A Teen’s Journey into Coding

As I mentioned in previous posts, my first real teenage job was writing articles for UAB Pačiolis. These were commissioned articles of a pre-defined length on topics related to information technology. The focus was often on providing tips for accountants, such as how to use Word and Excel more effectively or write proper emails.

For these articles, I earned around 150–160 Lithuanian litas (approximately €30–40 in today’s terms). The work was done under the author contracts, which were still popular then. But it wasn’t the money that mattered most!

With every article I wrote, I also received a free physical copy of the newspaper or magazine featuring my work. The pride and disbelief of seeing my name in print were far more rewarding than the money I earned. I remember spending 5–6 hours on one article, typically devoting a good half of my Saturday to it.

Parallel Pursuits: Learning PHP

At the same time, I was active on social media and forums, expressing my desire to learn PHP programming. I posted questions, shared my thoughts, and documented my first steps in programming—what I was learning and how I was progressing.

I vividly remember receiving a gift from a network technician who had set up our internet and who I stayed in touch with via a local mIRC channel. It was a massive book on PHP 4.0, with a blue cover and nearly a thousand pages.

That summer, when I started my blog, I spent my days reading and taking notes from that book. At the time, we didn’t have programming lessons at school—at least, not that I recall. My exploration of PHP was my first real foray beyond Pascal.

At first, I didn’t understand functions or variables. The concepts didn’t fit in my head, but I found them fascinating. It felt like living in one of those hacker movies I used to watch. I was genuinely curious about how real hackers worked and what kinds of code they wrote.

I still have a notebook from that time where I painstakingly wrote down and memorized PHP functions. Yes, it’s true! On summer evenings, I would copy functions like array_sort() into my notebook and then study them in bed, committing them to memory. Understanding and remembering these functions would help me better program and devise the algorithms I needed. Even back then, I was already thinking about quality!

The Drive to Learn

What motivated me most was the desire to improve my blog, adding features and customizing it. My entire blog, from fantomas.lans.lt to smaizys.lt, is still fully programmed by me—even the one you’re reading now!

This self-directed learning took quite a while before it translated into actual programming work. It was about a year and a half of self-study before I landed my first paid programming job. It happened by chance, thanks to my blog catching the attention of a fellow blogger and Twitter friend, Vidmantas Kabošis .

My First Programming Job: A Career Milestone

This marked a turning point in my career, although I didn’t yet consider myself a programmer. I probably felt less prepared than anyone applying for a developer position at PrestaRock today. At that time, I had just finished 11th grade and was still programming simple Pascal and C++ tasks for school, while my PHP work was limited to tweaking my blog.

I remember a cold winter evening, sitting and wondering how I would complete my first real project. I had no foundational knowledge of website creation—no examples of where to start or how to structure a system.

I had a design and had to turn it into a functional solution, and it had to be in Russian—a language I didn’t understand at all. That was how I created my very first website from scratch.

How many errors do you think it had? How much of it didn’t work on the first try? A lot. Many things had to be redone. And what about security? Let’s not even go there!

Gaining Confidence and Moving Forward

Soon after, I gained more confidence, and by the spring of 2010, I landed my first job with an official employment contract. From then on, I took on various freelance projects under author contracts.

In the next post, I’ll share more about my first actual programming jobs! You can find all the posts on my English blog too.