Christina Hall learned to code around age 12 making MySpace themes and playing Neopets. She thought account hacking and theft of virtual currency were part of the game, not realizing it was criminal behavior. These early platforms led her into web design.
Chapters
I have quite literally been coding websites since I was 12 and before. You are like, oh yeah, haha. I was like coding my MySpace themes and like putting music on my MySpace. That's amazing for you. I love that I was doing more than that. To give you some context, I was really into a website called Neopets at the time. If you missed out, you missed out. I'm sorry. But it was an amazing time to be alive. I actually think they still exist. I should log on and check my money. But because I was young, I didn't know there were rules to the Internet and laws against things. And I knew through forums that like, this was like a little mini economy basically game. And so like a lot of people were making a lot of money and there were people like stealing money from people by like getting their passwords and stuff. At the time I thought this was just part of the game. I did not know they were hacking people's accounts and stealing their stuff. Granted it was fake money, but I thought it was all part of the game. So I really thought that if you were smart enough to figure out someone else's password, you could just get in there and steal their money.