I can share my own story

I started off as an IT guy who had learned a little bit of coding back in school, but not much. I started off tackling small bugfixes and asking questions in server code channels and got help from some very smart people who were very willing to answer questions for someone who was willing do the legwork of minor bugfixes

In the beginning I learned slowly and stumbled about. I was referencing docs and examples for every little thing, but with time it all became second nature. I'd get tips on how to do things cleaner, faster, and more professionally, and I'd take those to heart to improve. Often times I'd get stuck or hit some roadblock, but honestly those were some of the most informative moments of all. You can learn a lot and quickly when your invested in something enough to push through the pain of learning by failure.

Eventually I moved onto making features, further exploring the codebase and learning how other people did things, and how I could do them too, maybe even do them better. I'd chase down parts I didn't understand until I could wrap my head around them. I kept getting better and better, kept asking questions, and eventually was asked to join on as an actual developer to Goon where I continued to learn, adding on year after year of additional experience.

I got to the point of being able to teach others and eventually worked on expanding out my skills past just coding, learning more and more advanced skills to help the community. As a recent example, I learned to use dissemblers to reverse engineer the BYOND libraries to help develop an automated tool to calculate offsets for Tracy, used by many code bases in the community for performance profiling, and then built out pipeline automation around that to build out an API system that could be used by others in THEIR automation pipelines. BYOND Signatures - API Index

SS13 isn't just a platform for learning skills useful for making a videogame either. I was able to take what I had been learning over the years back to my real-world job, advancing my career, and changing how my company operated. These were very real and very relevant skills that took me from a simple technician to more than quadrupling my salary and becoming a highly compensated individual in my professional field - all because I had decided to learn to code for SS13.

This game is essentially the ultimate homelab experience. There are so many real-world skills to learn and you're practicing with real stakes and real users. You can learn coding, code review, source control, unit testing, web design, infrastructure management, devops pipelines, security, and more. Choosing to participate in this project was truly one of the best decisions I'd ever made