They say every journey begins with a single step.
Mine began with a single typo.
After that late-night ChatGPT rabbit hole—where I asked it why it was so smart and ended up questioning my entire life—I woke up the next morning with purpose in my bones and brain fog in my head.
I wasn't going to build a school app anymore.
I was going to build an AI.
Eventually.
Step one: learn Python.
I Googled "how to learn Python" and clicked the first beginner tutorial I saw. A smiling man in a blue shirt appeared on YouTube with the title:
> "Python for Absolute Beginners Who've Never Coded a Day in Their Life (and Maybe Just Found Out Computers Have Code)"
Perfect.
The video told me to download an "IDE." After ten minutes of debating whether IDE was a fancy iced drink, I learned it was basically a text editor for code. Cool.
I downloaded one called Thonny. Because apparently, you don't start with cool hacker-looking terminals. You start with software named like a toddler's imaginary friend.
The instructor said, "Let's type our first line of code!"
print("Hello, world!")
Simple. Symbolic. Easy.
I typed:
pritn("Hello, world!")
Error.
Then:
print("Hello world!)
Another error.
Ten minutes later, I finally got it right.
print("Hello, world!")
It printed on the screen.
I stared at those words like I had just opened a portal. I high-fived myself. Then took a screenshot and sent it to nobody because I had no one to impress.
This was it.
The official start of my villain arc.
That first day, I learned how to print text, how to add numbers, and how to store values in variables. I made a little script that said:
name = "Manuel"
print("Welcome, " + name + "!")
It felt like talking to the computer and having it respond like a slightly slow pen pal.
By lunchtime, I'd made a program that asked my age and told me if I was old enough to vote.
Spoiler: I was.
By evening, I learned how to use if-else statements and built a mini "Should I Eat Cereal?" app.
milk = input("Do you have milk? (yes/no): ")
if milk == "yes":
print("Eat cereal.")
else:
print("Eat toast. Dry toast.")
It worked.
Unless I typed "YES" in all caps. Then it panicked and suggested I update my language settings.
Still, I was proud.
The next day, I met loops.
"Loops let you repeat things," the tutorial guy said, smiling like he wasn't about to drop me into an infinite while True: disaster.
I tried this:
for i in range(5):
print("Still not a billionaire.")
It printed that message five times.
I laughed out loud.
Then changed the range to 50.
And forgot how to stop it.
Ctrl+C became my new best friend.
But I didn't stop. Every small bug became a puzzle. Every solution became a tiny hit of dopamine. My YouTube history now looked like:
"Variables in Python – Explained Like You're Five"
"Loops vs. Logic – Beginner Python Mistakes"
"Why Your Program Broke and How to Cry Gracefully"
By the end of day three, I built a calculator.
A clunky, barely working calculator, but still.
num1 = int(input("Enter first number: "))
num2 = int(input("Enter second number: "))
op = input("Choose operation (+, -, *, /): ")
if op == "+":
print(num1 + num2)
elif op == "-":
print(num1 - num2)
elif op == "*":
print(num1 * num2)
elif op == "/":
print(num1 / num2)
else:
print("Invalid operation.")
It crashed if I typed "two" instead of "2."
But hey—learning.
Each time I fixed something, it felt like my brain did a push-up.
Every mistake was like a breadcrumb. Leading me somewhere. Deeper into the forest of logic, bugs, and syntax errors. But weirdly… I liked it.
It didn't matter that I wasn't building AI yet.
This was the part where the future engineers start—learning how to spell "print" correctly.
By day four, I was writing functions.
def greet(name):
print("Hello, " + name + "!")
I called it with greet("Neo") and grinned like a mad scientist.
That's when I realized something wild: I wasn't just watching tutorials. I was building muscle memory. I was starting to think in code.
I started organizing a "Dev Folder" on my desktop. It had files named:
calculator.py
breakfast_bot.py
mood_checker_v2.py
donotopen_THISone.py (which just printed "You were warned.")
I knew I was hooked when I stayed up until 2 a.m. debugging a problem that ended up being a missing colon. A colon. One tiny dot and squiggle had ruined an hour of my life.
Still, I couldn't stop.
Because every fix, every bug squashed, made me feel like I was unlocking a new skill tree. Like coding was this secret power, and I had finally found the entry door.
And the best part?
ChatGPT was with me the whole way.
I'd ask it stuff like:
Me: "What's a while loop?"
ChatGPT: "It's like a for loop that doesn't know when to stop—just like your Netflix binging habits."
Or:
Me: "Why won't my calculator stop crashing?"
ChatGPT: "Try using try/except blocks to catch errors. Also, maybe don't divide by zero."
It was like having a tutor that never got tired—or charged money.
So no, I wasn't building Friday yet.
But I was learning how to build the bones of something like it.
And yeah, my code still looked like a spaghetti monster with logic holes the size of Ghana.
But it was my spaghetti monster.
My code.
My journey.
And I was just getting started.