Ryan Shatzkamer's introduction to software engineering ended in a ban. He was seven years old, playing on a Minecraft server, and had installed a cheat client so he could fly. The server's detection caught him almost immediately. Most children would have made a new account and moved on. Shatzkamer opened the game's files in Notepad instead, found the setting that governed the double jump and removed its cooldown. The server was watching for creative-mode flight, not a player bouncing endlessly upwards. He was soon airborne again, using a feature the server itself had built.
"That was my first real look into how software actually works," he says. The pattern has repeated ever since. When a Transformers mod he downloaded was missing one of Bumblebee's abilities, he built the ability himself and published it. When he wanted his friends on his own Minecraft server, he hosted it from his home machine. Every locked door became an invitation to study the hinges.
