A thank you to the Omnimaga community

[epic7]

Some 5 years ago, in middle school, I joined Omnimaga, curious about calculator programming, never having written code before.
Through this community, I learned about Axe, and started my first coding project. I finished a stupid shooting game, that I was incredibly proud of at the time.
I found Omni to be a fantastic community of fantastic people, and I wanted to stick around and start some new projects that I could share. Most of my games never ended up getting finished, but still, the experience of writing calculator games got me hooked in programming.

Thanks to that spark that I found here, when I entered high school, I decided to take computer science and join a robotics team. Although my interest in calculators faded as I became increasingly inactive around here, I continued coding robots and computers. Programming became my love during high school.

Now, I'm just a few days away from starting college, to pursue computer science at MIT.
I truly believe it was calculator programming and the Omnimaga community that enabled me to discover the passion that got me accepted to my dream school.
Sure enough, my college admissions essay started off with:

In 7th grade algebra, I was introduced to an incredible machine. With a whopping 27 kilobytes of RAM and a blazing fast 6 MHz processor powered by 1970s technology, the TI-83 Plus graphing calculator was a vessel of pure magic to me.

So with that in mind, I'd like to thank the all the wonderful individuals on this site who inspired me, the admin team for keeping this place up and running, and the Omnimaga community as a whole. And it looks like DJ Omni isn't here anymore, but if you see this, thanks for starting this place. It sparked an interest that changed my life for the better.

[Sorunome]

It's super cool to hear that you enjoyed calculator programming that much and haven't stopped with coding at all, but actually expanded into other areas! It's increadible that it's already been five years (we joined around the same time). These five years have been a blast for sure.

I personally find calculator programming quite helpful to get somebody new to programming motivated as, with TI-BASIC you actually get rather fast results when making something like a game. Granted, the basic interpreter isn't the quickest thing around, but that actually teaches you an important skill many seem to forget: Writing your games optimized. With todays high-end personal computer you could just execute crappy code at high speed and wouldn't notice it was crappy and could be heavily optimized for speed.... And yeah, it helps a lot that you get visual feedback quite quickly. I can imagine having only terminal output would drain the motivation out of newcomers.

Nevertheless, a big part of such an experience is the people you are around of, the community. So, from me another big thank-you to the whole community for being over-all quite friendly (Yes, there is some drama, but drama is un-avoidable as soon as you have more than a single person. Even with only one person you can have drama ). This community has motivated me a lot to learn more and more programming, too, and I also give caluclator programming a lot of credit for where I currently am, coding-wise.

As for you epic7, I'm looking forward to your future contributions and am interested in what your current projects are

[Deep Toaster]

Definitely feel ya epic7—stumbling upon Omnimaga was probably one of the best things to happen to me in high school. The people here are great, Omni is still one of the most supportive communities around, and the whole calculator community was a fantastic inspiration that helped shape my own life.

Hope you stick around and good luck at MIT! I do visit there once or twice a year so if you're up for it we can meet up with whomever else is around there

[SpiroH]

Some 5 years ago, in middle school, I joined Omnimaga, curious about calculator programming, never having written code before.
...

Very touchy that you reminded the community's contribution on a moment of joy and happiness! I can feel it, I guess. A tiny bit of advice though, please make sure to keep your social rib alive for the times to come.
Yeah, IMHO this community is indeed fantastic, spread the word and we'll be even happier.  After all, we've got Foxes, Flying Toasters and all the rest of it that like calculators and like stuff.
Have a nice time at MIT but don't get too carried away.

[shmibs]

get as carried away as possible!!!

computers are magic ^_^

[Deep Toaster]

Yeah, IMHO this community is indeed fantastic, spread the word and we'll be even happier.  After all, we've got Foxes, Flying Toasters and all the rest of it that like calculators and like stuff.

++ this community is really about the people (aren't they all?)

I was pleasantly surprised to find that a handful of the people I met actually knew of Omnimaga. YMMV but ask around!

computers are magic ^_^

Except that they don't handle blunt force very well

[TIfanx1999]

@epic7 :Congratulations, that's fantastic!