Learning to code with Doom! (Now I’m even more confused!) by Phil Salvador During the pandemic, I picked up programming as a hobby in order to help my friend create a mod for the 1993 video game Doom. This was my first time embarking on a major coding project, and it turns out this was probably not the easiest place to start! Over the years, the Doom game engine has been modified and re-implemented so many times that now it uses multiple programming languages stacked on top of each other. For someone like me with minimal coding exposure, this was challenging, to say the least! In this talk, I’ll walk through one of my misadventures that taught me it can be fun when coding is confusing. I started with a simple task — playing a sound effect — that rippled out into so many other issues that it made me wonder why I didn’t just take up baking like everyone else instead! Phil Salvador is a librarian, digital archivist, and video game historian who writes about unusual old computer games on his blog, The Obscuritory. But most importantly, he is a friend to all birds.