I’ve taken some time over the past two days to dig through some of my old flash drives for old programs I wrote in high school. I found most of my flash drives, and while a few had been re-purposed over the years, I ended up finding a lot of content I created over the course of my pre-college schooling.

I didn’t find everything. When I started taking electives in high school, I first enrolled in a web design class. This was basic Photoshop, HTML, and Dreamweaver development. I can’t really find any of this stuff anymore. I also took a CAD class where I used AutoCad, Inventor, and Revit. These files look to be gone as well. More notably, I took a series of programming-heavy classes: Introduction to Programming (C++), Advanced Programming (C++), AP Computer Science (Java), Advanced Programming (Java), and Introduction to Video Game Design (Games Factory and DarkBasic).

Even when I took these classes a little over five years ago, the curriculum was outdated. DarkBasic was never really a mainstream programming language, and Games Factory was more event mapping than it ever was programming. We learned C++ using a 1996 version of Visual Studio and only learned the concepts of object oriented design later in the advanced class. The Java curriculum was brand new to the school when I took it, but still felt outdated.

That said, I learned a hell of a lot here that would lay a foundation for my future education and career path.

I took the time to copy these files from my flash drives and push them to a GitHub group I created for people who took these same classes as I did. The hope here is that the people I had class with will ultimately share and submit their creations, and we can browse these early samples of our programming. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any of my Java programs yet, but I might be able to come up with more places to look.

Just digging through my source code, I’ve already found a lot of weird errors and places where dozens of lines of code could be replaced with one or two.

It’s interesting to look back on these programs, and maybe they’ll give you a laugh if you care to check them out. I know they gave me one.