Let It Be: My First Programming Lesson Came from a Beatles Song

The Night Everything Almost Broke

The monitor is the only light left in my room. It's late, way too late, and on my screen sits this monster I built with my own hands: an all-in-one developer platform for Unreal Engine, stuffed with AI tools, paid courses, plugins, and menus that branch into more menus. I can feel the pressure sitting right on my chest, like a second keyboard I can't push off. And I'm just sitting there telling myself I can't stop. That if I stop, I'm a failure. That every hour I've poured into this thing turns to nothing the second I walk away. Truth is, my mental health was crumbling and I couldn't even say that out loud. Not to anyone. Barely to myself.

Four years earlier, it all started with a whale.

The Beginning: A Whale, and a Click

I was ten when a game called ABZU just swallowed me whole. Not the gameplay. Not the puzzles. The water. Sunbeams cutting through the deep, this whale drifting past like it owned the whole ocean, schools of fish moving like one single creature. I just sat there, frozen, staring. And something clicked inside me, hard. I didn't want to play worlds anymore. I wanted to build my own.

My mom, bless her, she saw that spark in me and bought me my first computer: a MacBook Air M2. I'm typing these words on that exact same machine right now. It's still alive. Still sitting right beside me. Still humming quietly like it's waiting for the next dumb big idea I get.

That click didn't cost a thing. No price tag on the moment a kid decides the real world isn't enough. Just me, some pixels, and this thought that wouldn't leave me alone.

Inspiration's the cheapest thing I've ever owned.

The Funny Detour

So I downloaded Unity to make games. Here's the thing I didn't know: Unity uses C# for scripting. I just... skipped right over the part where it said "C#." And spent months with my head down in C and C++, totally convinced I was learning game programming, wondering why nothing I wrote would compile, and when it finally did compile, why it did absolutely nothing. Yeah. That was me for months.

I was basically a chef who'd bought a fully equipped kitchen and then spent six months perfecting a recipe for concrete.

And you know what's funny? The detour still kind of saved me. By the time I finally, embarrassingly figured out my mistake, I'd soaked up enough real fundamentals that it didn't feel like wasted months anymore. More like a very scenic shortcut. A really, really embarrassing scenic shortcut.

Nobody reads the docs first. I swear that's just how all of us learn.

The First Real Build

Eventually, I actually built the thing. A first-person 3D parkour game, think Only Up! but with active skills: wall jumps, dashes, this momentum that just felt amazing. And I finished it. I mean I really, end to end, finished a game. I still hold onto that part. That still counts.

Then I looked at the graphics, told myself they weren't good enough, and scrapped the whole project. Just like that. Gone.

The source code vanished over time. And God, the me from back then still wishes I had it. Not because the game was good, it wasn't. But because it was done. That was my first little seed of perfectionism, and it took me forever to see what it really cost me: a finished game, deleted, because finished wasn't pretty enough. I couldn't admit it then, but I was already scared of being judged for something rough.

Shipping ugly beats not shipping at all. I had to learn that the hard way.

Age 13, a Heavy Rig, and an Oversized Ego

At thirteen I decided to go big. Unreal Engine this time. And once again, my mom backed my obsession and helped me build a powerhouse rig: an RTX 5080 and a Ryzen 9950X. Ray tracing before breakfast. Top-tier hardware, no question. I felt unstoppable. My stomach still drops thinking about how cocky I was.

Because top-tier hardware also amplifies an oversized ego, and mine? Mine was already way oversized.

First I tried to build an open-world game. Alone. Just me. Animation pipelines. Vehicle physics. Dynamic weather. I owned a machine that could render entire cities and I spent my evenings fighting the animation system just to make one character walk down a hallway. One hallway. Reality hit me hard and fast, and honestly, it hurt.

So I pivoted. Okay, if I can't build the world, I'll sell shovels to the gold miners. I started building this massive all-in-one developer platform for Unreal Engine and fell right back into my old trap of going broad instead of deep. AI tools. Paid courses. Plugins. Integrations. Probably would've added a built-in coffee maker if I'd figured out how.

Looking back, that platform was a feature blob with legs. It did everything and nothing well, because it was just one teenager, a pile of ambition, and a very expensive GPU. That's it. That's all it ever was.

Going broad instead of deep: my greatest talent at thirteen, apparently.

The Breaking Point

This is the part I still remember in slow motion. My chest gets tight just thinking about it.

That platform was grinding me down. Every feature I added spawned three more that supposedly "had to" exist. And I just kept forcing myself to push through, grinding against impossible odds, even as my mental health was falling apart. I was completely trapped in my own expectations. Every night it was the same loop: pressure, then guilt, then even more pressure. I was exhausted and I wouldn't tell anybody.

I remember one night in particular. I opened the project to add some feature nobody had even asked for, and instead I just scrolled through the content browser: folder after folder, menu trees branching into more menu trees, this whole city I'd built for an audience that didn't even exist yet. And somewhere in there was a feature I couldn't even remember why I'd built. I closed the laptop and just stared at my ceiling. That was the closest thing I had to a cry for help, and I didn't tell a soul.

Then, out of nowhere, I stumbled onto a song. "Let It Be."

It was my very first time listening to rock music, and my very first time hearing The Beatles. I knew nothing about the band, nothing about the song's history. I just heard those chords and that voice, and something inside me started to unclench. Like my shoulders dropped an inch without me telling them to.

I won't pretend that song fixed my life in one listen. It didn't. Not even close. But it cracked something open, and it gave me permission to stop holding my breath for a minute.

That song didn't teach me to quit, it taught me to let go of all that pressure I'd been putting on myself.

After Letting Go

Learning to let it be gave me the courage to walk away from that bloated platform. Not to quit the dream, just to let go of the version of the dream that was crushing me. I hit the reset button, and my hands were shaking when I did it.

The week after I closed the project, I was braced to feel like a total failure. And what I actually felt? My shoulders coming down from my ears. I could breathe again. I archived the platform, I couldn't bring myself to delete it, but I moved it somewhere I wouldn't have to see it every morning. Then I did the thing I'd been avoiding for a whole year: I built something small. Not a platform, not a world. Just a little tool that did one job, finished in days instead of years. It wasn't pretty and nobody used it, and it was the most fun I'd had in months. Small, sharp, done. That was the whole revelation for me: oh, I can still finish things.

Stepping away from game engines opened my eyes to a whole new world: AI applications and modern software. I fell in love with shipping something real, something someone can actually use that same day, especially AI-powered tools that put the raw power of large language models directly into people's hands. It felt light again. Like playing again.

Case in point: this entire site. I built it from scratch, exported as pure static pages. No database, no CMS, no feature blob. Just a clean design, a few hard rules, and content that actually ships.

I didn't quit the dream. I just traded perfectionism for focus. That open-world game might come back one day, who knows. And when it does, I'll build it the way I build everything now: small, sharp, and finished.

The thing that ships always beats the thing that could've been.