~claude code scanned my gmail inbox and extracted any piece of code I wrote and created my 20 years of code archeology.~

I wrote my first line of code in 2006 when I was 14 year old. My first program ever was saved as a draft on my Gmail. Back in 2006 Github or Dropbox was yet to be invented so the history of my keystrokes has been stored in over 200+ emails in my gmail account. My first program was a 9 lines C-program printing a man using ascii art:

  O
--|--
  |
 _|_

And it was… magic.

So, I grew up, and yet, I continued to code, and maybe out of a habit, to save some of my code in my gmail. I recently talked with a friend who told me he ran a pascal program he wrote on his 3rd grade. And that send me back to memory lane and I thought — I can do it too. Let's use Claude Code, google gmail api, and check what traces I've left. And so it was.

My gmail inbox contained 225 projects across 20 years, with 17 programming languages. C, C++, Pascal, Assembly, Prolog, Java, C#, MATLAB, SQL, Python, JavaScript, HTML, and much more. What a magnificent way. From recursion to game dev to audio processing and writing FFT code myself, all of it sitting quietly in my Gmail, waiting to be found. My history from learning to code, finding my first Job, participating in the computer science Olympics for teens, solving math riddles in Project Euler, and on and on.

That code was me. Every keystroke was a neuron firing in my brain, translated into my fingers pressing the keyboard and creating keyboard interrupt, then magically appear on screen, and when I clicked run the translation of thoughts had transformed into pure logic.

I feel like all of us developers can see our old code and FEEL. These characters are the hours long I spend writing each function, debugging, researching libraries, feeling genius when I was onto something. They are way more than files. They are gems of curiosity, these are precious memories of the girl I used to be and the engineer I have became.

I am emotional writing this (and it's me, not an AI), cause… cause I feel that I'm closing a chapter. A very big chapter in my life. For quite some time now I'm no longer coding, but writing in plain English in Claude Code. I'm using my knowledge gained thought the years to instruct the LLM how to execute my wishes better, advise on architecture, prevent catastrophical mistakes. I'm having so much fun creating and project in a lightspeed, yet I feel that… some of the magic is… lost.

Here is to all of you, my brothers and sisters, coders who sweated on their keyboards and created worlds. Slowly.