All I had was a thick book in a language I didn't speak yet.
No internet, no friends to bounce it with. Infinite time.
Good times.
Almost 40 years later, in 2025, I learned about the "protected" save format in GW-BASIC, and that there are tools to open those files and allow you to list the code.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7104/how-...
That and going to the weird room at the dept. of education across from the library that kept drawers full of floppies and sifting through all the random public domain code & shareware.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sbqa61/gorilla...
Even then they were underwhelming...
I'm not sure if it's optimal, but this is a 2-burn solution that does 1 burn to hit x=20 and another to hit v>=-14 right afterwards: https://gist.github.com/sgentle/d88dd6fe37e76f9167db24379dc7...