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How I Made $200,000 When I Was 16

Rodney Gainous Jr.

9 min read·<br>Feb 26, 2018

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Me @ 15 in my room where the magic happened.About three years ago, I published a story about how the Twitter app I built in high school, Follow, reached 150,000 downloads in two years. In that article, I alluded to the even larger story about how I got into software. Well, here it is.<br>Nine years ago today (wow!) I got my first remote gig writing software. I didn’t have an official title or anything, but I was writing scripts in Java. To give you some perspective, 10 years ago I was in 9th grade, 13 years old , with just three months of self-taught coding experience. Over the next couple of years, I would go on to make ~$200,000 of gross income. Here’s how I did it.<br>From gaming to coding<br>It all started when I found myself lost in the gaming world. Most days, I would spend the majority of my time playing Call of Duty, Gears of War, Runescape, and whatever else I could get my hands on. All of my friends would meet up on these games daily to play, and we slowly shifted from being outside most of the day, to playing online.<br>The most addicting game of them all was Runescape . It didn’t take long before I was hooked on this popular online role-playing game.<br>For those who don’t know it was built with Java. After numerous times waiting for the game to load, my interest in Java was piqued and this led me down the rabbit hole of software development.<br>With every Google search, I started to realize that if I knew how to write code, I could build my own software. That thought alone blew my mind. This was only the beginning, and over the next month my interest in programming continued to grow.<br>Not too long after I realized the power of Java, I found a book online called Teach Yourself Java in 21 days. I downloaded Eclipse and got started. The book fascinated me, and although I was still an avid gamer, I found myself growing more fond of my new hobby everyday.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

School Bus.After school, I would come home, do my chores, play games and code like clockwork. It didn’t take long for me to put my new programming skills to use. I wrote scripts that scanned documents, built random GUIs, and even wrote software to complete my math homework.<br>At that point in my life, it was like having a superpower that nobody knew about. Excited, I told my friend that I was learning Java and urged him to learn with me. He shrugged it off and stuck to gaming. At that moment, I knew I’d be alone in software, so I continued on my own and nobody knew — not even my family .<br>Digging deeper into programming<br>Months went by, and I started to become frustrated with the speed at which I was progressing in Runescape. So, I started to go on the hunt for cheats. To my surprise, there were many macros, bots, and scripts that you could run 24/7 to automatically play the game for you. This fascinated me. I tried every bot I could find, but found that most were garbage. I continued this until I stumbled upon a community that offered a free bot client. It could even run custom scripts. I joined the forum not knowing that within a couple months, my entire life would change.<br>This community was everything a kid like me could ever dream of! Over the course of a month, I must have tried at least 20 scripts. There were some that cut wood, some that fought monsters, and others that did quests for you. It was amazing what these bots could do automatically without any supervision.<br>I noticed the scripts were in Java but hadn’t considered trying to make one. Shortly after using those cheats, my account was permanently banned for reasons other than botting (just my luck). I was completely broken. I remember being in my room, on the verge of tears because the account I had spent hours and hours of my life on was banned. I begged Jagex, the company that made Runescape, to lift the ban but they wouldn’t, and I was out of luck.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

Code Lights.Turning lemons into lemonade<br>For a week straight I was angry, sad, and somewhat confused. I was angry and sad for obvious reasons — I had lost something of value to me. However, I was also confused. What would I do now? How would I spend my time? What would I tell my friends?<br>There were many questions, but I had no answers. It wasn’t long before a lightbulb switched, and I decided I’d make a new account. My idea was that I could use the cheats I found to level up to my original accounts stats, and fast. I was on a mission to get back to where I had fallen from, but there was one problem.<br>My previous account had high fighting stats, and at the time the community didn’t have many...