I started coding, nah, writing markup and stylesheets when I was 10 or something with NetBeans which was weird but it was the IDE that the tutorial guy used, hoping to learn how to make a website, make money then buy a good computer so I can run a proper 3D game engine (instead of construct which I didn't like) and make games.
While at first I just wanted to make money, It felt good. It went like this for a year and I didn't make any money. And I think I stopped programming or more precisely did much less programming than before for some reason I don't remember. After a year I started again, by then I had learned that I don't have to use NetBeans and I can use notepad++ which was smoother on my 1GB-ram-mobile-chipset-broken-keyboard-black-monitor-tochpad-burnt-connected-to-TV-via-HDMI Acer laptop. And yeah my neck hurt looking at the TV from close distance.
I switched to English learning sources, primarily w3schools. And It went on like this, I learned some JS. I bought a course with info I already knew, but it filled some holes on basic things, for example I didn't know what a title tag is. I completed the freecodecamp.org courses even though I knew most of the stuff, until the JS part. I didn't know what functional programming, OOP, and mutation mean. I was told to not change a variable, I didn't, I passed. I didn't understand. I was hoping to get a job with getting a freecodecamp certificate. Then I went to get the React certificate, I hadn't worked with React before or any other framework. I learnt why frameworks are cool.
I participated in some middle-school competition, I chose the software topic for some reason and made a timer with C# and it got rejected. Next year same story with Game topic, I don't know if I even made anything. Then next year I made a question generator with js and it was rejected.
I got accepted to "shining talents" school, and people got surprised because unlike others I studied while I programmed and watched movies and played games, even in finals. People were very smarter than me and I found out I was a big frog in a small pond. But many of them didn't program. So I was mostly studying, but then after the first term exams, there was a golden time, when I only programmed and studied, mostly programmed and didn't play any games. Not because I forced myself to, because programming was much much more enjoyable than games to me.
That time passed, and not only I programmed less than the peak, I programmed less than ever. By the way, for 2 years, I would do 6 months of web dev, get bored then switch to game dev. And I participated in GMTK game jam every year. I made no interesting projects. Not even boring completed projects. Of course I completed a game once a year at the jam and that was it.
There was more studying, and then AI hype. Before AI hype I didn't like the way things went, I had to search simple things simple as loop syntax in JS (I kept forgetting syntax). Also I was only learning frameworks and making nothing. I was learning svelte at the time. After AI hype, I wrote literally no code. Sometimes I opened a HTML to program without AI, then I would just set up the basic stuff like fonts etc and then closing it. Even with AI I made nothing.
My friend told me to participate in national AI Olympiad. I got a national gold medal. And it was good because I felt even though my programming journey wasn't perfect, it has helped me, as I was saved by my practical score and became 1st practical. But I don't know what to do from now on. I don't seem to like AI. Even not sure if I like game dev anymore. Please help.