The Spark
In 2022, right after 12th grade, I was bad at coding despite two years of C++. I wasn’t interested in programming — I was interested in hacking.
While exploring that world, I learned phishing was one of the easiest attack vectors. So I tried building a demo Instagram login page. No laptop, no knowledge of HTML or CSS. Just an Android phone.
I discovered Termux — a terminal emulator for Android — and Neovim was the only editor that worked well in it. That became my dev environment. My first phishing page was a copy of Instagram’s login that sent credentials to a Telegram bot.
Building Portfolios
That small win pushed me to learn more. I decided to build a portfolio website with only HTML and CSS. Making a navbar and carousel from scratch was genuinely exciting.
Then my phone wiped the project. Gone. That’s how I learned version control matters — I started using Git immediately.
My next portfolio looked decent: good colors, a parallax effect, responsive layout. But I wanted to go further. I picked Angular as my first framework — deliberately choosing the harder option because I believed harder things force faster learning.
I rebuilt the portfolio in Angular 14, replicating a strong UI/UX design I found online and adding features like a blog section. It became one of my best learning experiences.
PrepZone and Early Projects
Alongside the portfolio work, a friend pitched a startup idea: an EdTech platform for students. I started building PrepZone — a tough project for a beginner, but it took shape bit by bit. I built the backend with Express and Node, rewrote the code several times to make it cleaner, and each rewrite felt like real progress.
Around the same time, I was in my first year of engineering. I applied to every tech society on campus and got selected in all of them — they were impressed by the portfolio and PrepZone. I started doing hackathons, building side projects, and hit 1000+ commits on GitHub before the year ended.
Leveling Up
JavaScript without types gets messy fast. I moved to TypeScript and started learning React, SSR vs CSR, state management patterns — the frontend ecosystem was evolving quickly and it was overwhelming. But I absorbed it over a few months and started building more complex projects.
I also finally got my first laptop in my first year of college. My workflow stayed the same though: WSL with Arch, Neovim, and tmux. I started maintaining my dotfiles and building custom development workflows.
First Internship
Then I landed an internship at an early-stage startup working with React and Web3. Web3 was completely new — smart contracts, wallets, on-chain data — so I learned from scratch.
It marked a real shift: from a self-taught student building side projects to a developer working on production applications that real people use.