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by bitexploder
1941 days ago
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MUDs were transformational for my life. I was an often lonely kid growing up with ADHD and a love of video games. I got into MUDs in 94 when we got our first PC right around my freshmen year of high school. I loved AD&D and this was the closest you could get on a computer. I became obsessed and learned Linux because they had the C compilers and Unix was how you hosted MUDs. I taught myself C with “C for dummies” vol 1, and 2, K&R C book, and Beej’s guides to networking, just released around that time. As well as learning every in and out of the CircleMUD code base, a Diku mud derivative. I spent a good chunk of my high school life building a MUD that got pretty popular (50+ users on the weekends). Coding new systems, learning creative writing. This led to me getting real jobs in web app dev in 98. The rest is history. I learned how to fix gnarly memory leaks with my own memory allocator and tools like libefence. Taming memory leaks meant my server could stay up longer, etc. I learned about graph theory, other algorithms, multi user networking. I never considered how hard or easy any of this was. It was just what I was obsessed with, so the difficulty had no real bearing on my mindset. MUDs gave me so much and for that I am grateful. |
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