… and it taught me some pretty useful skills.

I still remember the first line of code that I changed: I increased the single integer value to make the explosion diameter larger in Clonk Rage. I appreciate this moment because it was then that I first looked inside the program.

Later, I quickly lost interest in this, because many other problems piled on me. Then I got to practice as a programmer, mainly due to the fact that I talked about my hobby – modding cases, and could list the stages of making coffee in a technical style.

Again, at that time I was constantly plagued by problems. I could barely keep myself afloat, desperate to get to a level where I could understand patterns, inheritance, and interfaces.

Then, using the imacros tool that you are probably familiar with, I opened up a whole world of scripting. This tool has a macro recording function that allows you to automate actions without a single line of code (but you can write it if you want).

I used this tool to automate the annoying process of posting from my tumblr porn blog to a site called sex.com (advertised as “Pinterest” for porn at the time). Over time, this blog grew into a whole network of blogs curating niche content and allowing me to pay my rent.

Of course, I was quickly banned for too many publications per day, made in a matter of minutes. Therefore, for the first time I had to write real code, insert delays into it and use my old laptop as a kind of server that stretches all publications for a day. This literally saved me many hours of monotonous work.

Needless to say, I developed an addiction and wanted more. My life started to go downhill and hit a new bottom when I created a fully automated process from a C # application that switched between users, logged into profiles, and automated blogs (tumblr had a queue limit of 300 posts).

The app worked on an incredibly hacky basis – the console app generated iMacros code blocks, saved them to a folder, and then used parameterized assembler calls to launch the Chrome browser with an iMacros script. It was a glorious time.

While creating all of this, I suddenly felt a decrease in the workload due to the fact that I began to understand so much more. A ray of hope dawned on me, and I quickly realized that the automated process, although it worked, was rather low-quality. It’s funny that the script as a whole worked almost without errors, although I don’t remember that after creating it, I fix any bugs.

Over time, this led me to explore better options, in particular Python and Selenium. Soon I realized that I was a complete noob, I didn’t understand anything and gave up learning Selenium, but I got some knowledge of Python.

I returned to all this about a year later, already having much more experience. I banged my head against the wall until it began to crumble and a hole appeared that I could crawl through. Suddenly I understood the concept of APIs and why they are so useful to use instead of scripting, so I dived into a deep dive into the Tumblr API.

It also taught me to properly document the code, I got to the fifth page of Google search more often than ever before. Thanks to this, I was able to automate the tumblr Queue and add different options, titles and links to my website. I learned about Spintax and used the magic of regular expressions to ensure that unique headers are generated at random intervals. It was exciting.

With that done, I started learning Selenium, which is infinitely more powerful than iMacros and can be executed from Python code. So now I started developing a good solution, using source control, built-in monitoring messages, and error handling in case something stops working.

Greed seized me, I decided to dive into the study of developing my own niche websites that embed videos from large sites. Curiously, these sites not only allow you to do this, but also pay for any traffic that leads to them. This is how I came to know about static websites using a fairly sophisticated Jekyll system with Python generated post files. They had built-in dates, allowing you to publish ten posts a day from a list of thousands of videos; I used a website with a cron trigger that calls the build handler with Netlify once an hour. If a new post was ready, it was published immediately.

And somehow it all worked. I wrote a lot of lines of code, did a lot of research, and did a lot of trial and error. I stopped playing video games because it was more interesting. Then I got to the crypt thanks to a guy who talked about a bitcoin ad network that sometimes paid huge sums a day depending on the exchange rate. A Tumblr blog that used to make $ 2 a day now often made $ 20.

And then Tumblr decided to do Sudoku and ban all “adult” content, losing about 30% of its total traffic as a result. It was later bought for a ridiculously low amount. My whole system collapsed in just a month, fortunately, I had not yet had time to quit my main job.

But the amount of knowledge that I gained in the course of this work is huge, from automation to creating a website, and then to Python, and it all works for me today. I wouldn’t have learned any of this in my regular job, and I’m glad I started the journey down that rabbit hole.

Takeaway: Porn is a curious field full of coding opportunities and lessons you won’t get elsewhere.

I have learned that the way I have chosen to learn coding poses many challenges that have not been solved before. It is usually quite difficult to find a good problem to solve and motivation for learning – people are simply bored of creating the same RSS aggregator, written by many before them.

For me it was a way to escape from the hell of tutorials, in which you have no idea how to develop further and you have no real tasks. I needed money for rent and this desire led me to the dark world of creativity.

In addition, it is also a world where there is a huge vacuum, explored by very few, and even fewer people in it have knowledge of coding. It’s often done by hand, and it’s amazing how easy it can be to automate, but if they don’t have the gaze of a programmer, they don’t know it.

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