I used to fear the “computer classes” during my school years (6th-7th grade). I didn’t have a PC back then, which would make me feel embarrassed whenever someone started talking about anything remotely related to computers. Back then, it was my trigger to skedaddle the first chance I got. I know it seems weird, but now that I think about it, much has changed.

The Beginnings

Once I got my hands on my first computer (an Intel Pentium 4 machine with XP and 1.5 gigs of RAM), sometime around 9th grade, my days were filled with being overwhelmed by looking at Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 and being excited about writing HTML pages. The rest of my free time I spent on online games, browsing Miniclip for hours (remember when Flash was still alive?). I started tinkering with Windows XP, messing around with the Windows registry—changing start button colors, adding images to the right-click context menu, and more. Needless to say, that stuff was addictive, and I could spend hours doing it without feeling any burnout.

My favorite game to this day is the Zombotron series. I still play it sometimes!

Fast forward to 11th grade, I took Computer Science as a subject. At that time, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do in life. I was just going with the flow, like most high-school kids in India.

Life has its way. One day, I went to this local café with my dad for some reason. There I found my first programming mentor (i.e., I ended up joining “tuition” classes for CS; I can see the younger generation and some self-taught programmers rolling their eyes right now). Whatever the motivation was, I must give credit to my mentor for teaching me how a for loop works. Naive me was blown away by how the computer handled repetitive tasks. That day, I knew I would pursue something in this domain.

The very first page of my first programming notebook. The handwriting in black is mine, whereas the one in blue is my mentor’s. The date reads 1st October, 2015.

After that, I dedicated more time to programming during 12th grade. We studied “OOPs”1 with C++. I didn’t actually care much about the prestigious exams that most science students were preparing for during that time. But to make sure I didn’t give up on the opportunity, I enrolled in a small coaching institute to prepare for JEE. Meanwhile, my interest in Computer Science continued to grow stronger.

Now, to set some context for this next anecdote, CS as a subject in school was (and is) not taken seriously by most students. The subject is often opted by students as it’s usually easy to score in (in comparison to Physics or Chemistry), or it sometimes comes as a packaged deal for folks going in non-medical domains.

So this one time, our Computer Science teacher pulled me out of a physics class in 12th grade to help her grade the paper of a student who was in 11th grade. Yes, this sounds unethical, but I felt like a boss nevertheless.

This probably happened because I was the only one genuinely interested in studying CS. I was also not a noticeable student in the class, i.e, a potential topper, just an average joe.

My late high-school days were also the time when, for the very first time, I technically “forked” a project downloaded from SourceForge to add/remove features and submit it as a final result for a project report.

You might assume this dude was locked in and would score a perfect 100 in his CS board exams, right? Well, I got an 88. Not a bad start for a humble beginning :)

Soon after my school days were over, I had to decide on my career. I had three options:

1. Pursue a BS in Computer Science from Delhi University (didn’t happen since the cut-offs were sky-high; I had 78% in my board exams, so good luck with that!).
2. Pursue a BCA from a private university.
3. Pursue a BTech from a private university.

I ended up choosing BCA. Call it settling for less, but I was happy with my decision. Soon after starting college, I was introduced to the world of Open Source through our college’s newly formed tech club. I wrote about my first-ever pull request here.

The first job

My first and only internship2 was at a small IoT-based startup in Delhi called DyfoLabs. I was hired as a Backend Developer Intern. The coolest shit I did there was code on an ESP8266, I remember contributing something to the OTA update of the smart home device that controlled electrical appliances.

This job was my first & to date my last in-office job experience; it had everything you can ask from an in-office startup, garage-like experience, office shenanigans, etc.

In hindsight, it was a great experience. I needed that, 10/10 would do it again.

The first freelance gig

During the summer of 2021, I was at home, clueless, new to the industry, with only one internship to my name. I started cold-reaching out to founders with value prospects to hire me for any intern or full-time positions. At one company, in my outreach message, I proposed building a Go SDK for one of their API products and even wrote a complete README to showcase how it would look. It didn’t work out, but I got a proposition to write an article showcasing their product. I said yes, delivered the article in a week or so, and got my first freelance 💰.

Great things are yet to come (hopefully)

Fast forward to today, I’ve been in the industry for around 4 years, working as a Professional Software Engineer (whatever that means), freelancing, and giving back to the community. I have gone through all the phases: burnout, impostor syndrome, feeling like an expert beginner. Even with all the cons, this industry has been kind to me and I hope it continues to do so.

Can you imagine that? I manifested this during that one fine evening I learned about for loops, who would have thought the universe would echo it back to me like this?

Acknowledgements

It would be disappointing not to mention my first mentor, Mr. Rahul, if you are reading this, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I am really, really sorry for not being in touch with you over the years.

In you forgot it was/is a running joke, for some reason we call it OOPs even though its just OOP. ↩ 1.

It’s a job in the sense that I was paid for it. I don’t care about the industry’s definition for this context. ↩