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My first language was a Pascal-like DSL, learned for the sole purpose of mining ores while I was at school.

I think I should credit my salary to Jagex.

Thats too funny. And honestly, the fact that the game translates to the real world directly like that just blows my mind. I met a guy at a hackthon during uni who ran Sals realm of runescape. He told me that the selling the website basically payed his (canadian) tuition in full

My Runescape money making adventures paid for most of my life, even to this day.

Kaitnieks SCAR right? I was pretty involved in the cheating scene for RuneScape since around 2001, which I credit with getting me in to tech.

That's the one! Wow. I credit that early exposure for the same.

Ditto. AutoRune and later SCAR, Sleepwalker, et al were huge inspirations to teenage me. I spent a lot of time bugging Dylock and Kaitnieks for Delphi help over IRC.

When I had some downtime a year or so ago, it was really interesting to revisit the reverse-engineered clients (a la RuneBot, PowerBot, etc) and taking a look at how that was done then and now. Actually made me somewhat working with Java again.

Very cool to see other folks who found themselves on a similar path thanks to that community!

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