I flunked out of computer science.
That's not the setup for a redemption arc. It's just what happened. For two years I printed "Hello World" and built calculators without ever understanding what any of it was for. My grades collapsed, I got kicked out, and my friends kept moving forward while my parents didn't even know. I'd started to believe I wasn't smart enough for this field.
At community college, I started building a game for fun. And something strange happened: the math I'd been failing suddenly had a job to do. Euclidean distance moved my character. An integral was the area under a curve I could actually see. Computer science stopped being a wall of syntax and became something I could create with.
The game was Doodle Dodge. A stickman runs across lined notebook paper while erasers come in from the left and pencils draw obstacles from the right. Swipe up, swipe down, don't get erased. The background is a real sheet of paper: I crumpled it, took a picture, and used the photo. It took three nearly sleepless months, built around a full course load.
It reached about 13,000 downloads.
And then nothing changed, at least on the outside. No money, no overnight anything. I went right back to community college. But something internal had shifted: I had evidence. One small win in a big pool of losses, but it was enough to stop treating failure as proof that I was incapable. Everything that came after, the PhD in AI, the work with Google, traces back to a stickman on notebook paper.
Bringing it back
This year I rebuilt Doodle Dodge as a web game. The original took me weeks of nights. The rebuild took a weekend, with AI handling the syntax while I made the design calls, which is its own story about what these tools are actually good at.
Same stickman, same paper, same swipe up and swipe down. Except now it runs in your browser, works on your phone, and keeps a high-score board. You can play it right now at doodle-dodge-v2.vercel.app.
The SickKids part
[YOUR WHY, 1 to 2 sentences: why SickKids specifically. A personal connection, a visit, someone you know, or simply what that hospital means to Toronto. This paragraph has to come from you, so I left it open.]
Doodle Dodge's first job was to be evidence for me, proof that I could build something people wanted. Its second job is better. [MECHANISM, pick one and make it true: "Everything the game earns now goes to SickKids." / "For every 1,000 runs played, I'm donating $X to SickKids." / "The game now links to a SickKids fundraising page, and I'll match whatever it raises up to $X."]
If you want to help, it costs you nothing but a few minutes: [LINK: your SickKids fundraiser or donation page].
Go beat my high score
The game convinced me I belonged in this field back when nothing else did. I like that its second act is for kids working through something much harder than a failed semester.
So here's the whole ask: play a few rounds. Swipe up, swipe down, don't get erased. My name is on the high-score board, for now.