Similar story to me. I was big into games and game design as a kid and was already doing some light modding of games but only a little programming. I experimented with using a memory editor to cheat on the Flash games in 6th grade, which promptly led to my account being banned. I was devastated and wanted revenge and swore I would write my own, sophisticated autobuyer bot. By mid 7th grade, I finished my project. I wrote it in REALBasic (was on a Mac). I implemented a barebones HTTP socket and cookie jar on top of the raw TCP socket provided by the language and learned to do all of that by sniffing my own network traffic and reading parts of the RFCs. I wrote rudimentary String parsing functions to parse the HTML results since I don't know Regex, and I also defeated the shop CAPTCHAs using a novel approach I have never seen anyone else use to this day. My bot worked phenomenally.
Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.
Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.
Fast forward to college, I re-implemented my bot as a pet project to learn Python. This time it was much better and included automatic selling of loot, automatic auctioning with feedback based pricing algorithms, and multiple account coordination for using a command and control server. I'm pretty sure I was the most sophisticated botter on the platform at the time. I had a very roundabout way to convert the loot into USD and was making around 7-10$/day completely passively.
Out of college I interviewed at a malware reverse engineering company. When you pass the interviews, they ask you to give a presentation before you get your offer. I chose to do a presentation about the bot (it was interesting from a security perspective)... big mistake. The VP of engineering was suddenly "pulled in to something" and I went home without an offer.