About me

Intro

My name is Hallvard Lygre Hetlelid. I am a 23-year-old front-end developer living in Bergen. I starting programming some time around the end of 2018 and since then, programming has been my biggest hobby. I try to always have some project going, something to work on whenever I have the time.

I am currently in the final year of my bachelor's degree in Media- and Interaction Design at the University of Bergen. At the same time, I am taking additional courses each semester in order to gain a second bachelor's in Information Science, which in many ways is more up my alley than Interaction Design.

How it started

Since 2015, back in secondary school, I've been a huge fan of the incremental game Cookie Clicker. There's something uniquely satisfying about watching numbers climb higher and higher. Before long, I wanted to create my own incremental game—but at the time, I knew nothing about programming. It felt intimidating, almost impossible, like something I'd never be able to do. It took a few years before I finally decided I just had to give it a shot.

In 2018, I created my very first game: Tree Cutter, an incremental game about, well, cutting trees. I poured countless hours into it, constantly experimenting with new CSS tricks, discovering how to generate HTML programmatically with JavaScript, and pretty much Googling everything I didn't understand. It was a messy, unpolished project, but it taught me so much about programming.

I never did finish Tree Cutter, but making it was a turning point. It showed me that the best way to learn coding isn't through books or tutorials—it's by *building* things. The only true way to become a programmer is to set a goal and then figure out whatever it takes to achieve it.

My passion for incremental games never faded. Six years later, I'm working on a new project: Emoji Tycoon. This time, with the experience I've gained, I'm aiming to build a fully-realized mobile game, complete with a robust front-end and back-end.

My plants

Though my biggest hobby is programming, I also have a deep love for plants. Since moving into my own apartment, it has been steadily filled with more and more plants. My favorite are succulents, not only because they are low maintenance (although that is nice), also because they are simply very beautiful plants.