I’ll be honest, starting out I am not the best writer 😂 nor am I the best at explaining things especially when I get too excited even about the simplest of things.

The only thing I can promise you.. is that I am passionate about Computer Science, and that every blog I write will never in any way use AI or ChatGPT in order to fill out these sections. It would not be fair to you, the reader, or to me becuase it would mean I gave up on my goal of learning everything I can. So every post will always be coming straight from me, from my mind, most likely unfiltered and hopefully in an understandable, sensible manner (My sister is currently helping me type some of this up xD.)

So a little bit about myself, I’m a computer lad, some would call me a nerd. I guess, I officially got into computers when I came across a book by John Ducket called “HTML and CSS”. Reading and doing the exercises, I fell in love with coding and making pretty things appear on my computer screen. It wasn’t too long before I saved up to buy “JavaScript and JQuery” when my creative mind expanded at all the new tools I could use. I spent years messing around, creating logic, managing data, and coding random websites. I always wanted to use them as layouts for my Twitch streams, do something that would go far beyond what you could get from somewhere like StreamElements.

One of my very early projects, once I felt comfortable with all aspects in the Frontend was a Dungeons and Dragons Web app that helped my band of adventurers keep track of items, health, armor, and a lot of other things. It was fun, to be honest, I felt really proud of myself despite there being a few bugs and data logic errors to patch out. My players were amazed about everything the website could do, I could even run battle encounters on it and look up any spell. The site used JSON files to get all the info, this would sometimes make the site take forever to load depending on how much data was being requested, not to mention the only way to communicate data across multiple pages that I knew of was localStorage (don’t judge lol). Regardless, it’s the first amazing thing that I built, and I will forever be proud of it despite how cringe I feel at the methods used to achieve its functionality. If you are interested in seeing it, check it out at D&DWebApp

In a way you could say I can thank John Ducket for inspiring me to explore all on my own before even going to college. I made it my life’s mission to be able to connect to Twitch and have a site function the same way as a layout. This goal lead me to reading his next book “PHP and MySQL”. I’ll be completely honest with you… I barely understood this. It was harder to test becuase you needed a server for the files to work (which I had no idea how to do at the time). MySQL on the other hand, was something I wish I had known when I was making my D&D App, I found I could have fixed a lot of the content loading since MySQL allows you to limit how much data you pull with each request. At this point though, I was starting to stream on Twitch, and my whole goal now was to connect my websites to my Twitch so I could use it as layouts.

The tough parts of PHP were not a complete loss, it gave me a basic understanding of the communications between the front and back ends. It also taught me that it was possible to connect a server to another server, or database. I did some digging around and eventually came across the Twitch Helix API. I spent countless weeks studying it, looking over its documentation and wondering how in the heck I was gonna connect my websites to this. I saw things like how to pull public data from account, see your follower list, and things like EventSubscribtions, how Twitch can send over an alert when someone follows or subscribes. I finally found a nifty video on YouTube about how to create your own server to connect to the twitch api using NodeJS. Obviously reading this, I hope you can tell by now that this led to more reading, more books being bought, and more videos to be viewed. I found a package called twurmple that allowed an easy way to connect and send requests specifically to the twitch api. It took a while for me to finally feel confident and competent enough to attempt to write my own server. I slugged my way through making a Twitch token, my client secret, and creating the encoded response and status code so that the api would not blacklist me (Thankfully there was a tutorial for this). I used this server as a sandbox, testing out endpoints, seeing what information I could pull. This finally resulted in getting my own account info, it’s picture, and more detailed information i don’t want to get into. Using endpoint manipulation and parsing I was able to get the pic and name from my most recent follower and subscriber. As well as being alerted when I got new followers, using that info to pull the pic info from the user, and updating my data. All I needed now was a way to connect from my own server to my websites and this is where I learned about Web Sockets.

The end result being my Twitch Layouts. I remember how happy I was when it all was finally working, the pictures were showing, the animations were playing. I honestly think I cried as I showed this to everyone I knew at the time. Even though my twitch channel was never one of my big priorities, these layouts put my channel apart from everyone else. I assure you, not many streamers will have a layout that displays profile pictures like mine do. My friend, would always unfollow and then refollow me anytime I had a new layout just to see what animation would play. Along with the bot I also learned how to code using NodeJS, my channel finally felt complete… and to this day, I’m still using that server.js and bot.js files whenever I stream.

Thus, one door closed.. and then another one opened. I got introduced to a website called D&DBeyond, if you’ve never heard of it, it’s a really good website a lot of people use to play D&D. Seeing it gave me a though though.. how do I share the things I’ve created so that the world could see it, so that maybe my friends could type something in their url bar, and see what I created. This.. once again led to more book buying, and researching, all the books I read made it seem like it was so easy to host something but they never got into it because it was “outside the scope of this book”. My research revealed that there was a lot of websites that could host things but of course.. all the safe, decent ones cost money xD. With money being tight during this period in my life, I never felt safe enough to try to host my projects, I didn’t want to jepordize my family by uploading something to a suspicious host that would steal my information. I didn’t know where to go after this, things slowed down for a while before the opportunity to go to college showed itself during a time I was at my lowest… but my college experience is a topic for another day.