I started my developer journey in my school days. When I was in 11th grade, I took Informatics Practices as a subject. There I learned Python and MySQL. I still remember my first day in my computer lab, where all my fellow classmates were coding or at least trying to code and all I could do is to see them with astonishment.
As the classes started, I learned about Python and MySQL. I gradually started to get more confidence and I started loving it. There is always a person who is exceptionally well in your class. There was one in my class too. He always had my respect as a fellow coder and always inspired me to learn more.
During my school days, I learned a lot about Python and MySQL. I also made a good project during that time and it was a student admission management system. That was my first project in which I used a lot of if-else statements. The time was peaceful and it was before I know what real development was. It was more like a hobby.
It was covid time and I got admitted to my university as a computer science and engineering major student which I am currently. By the way, I am a 2nd-year student right now.
As I start college, I met many batchmates who were super awesome. They were at least 5 times more experienced and skilled than me at the same stage as I was i.e. in the first year of college. Many of them are my friends now and now we code and learn together.
During my period of the first semester. I got to know more about competitive programming and HackerRank. I started doing hacker rank questions for Python and MySQL which I learned in my school days. During this period, I got to know what professional life is and how these skills really matter in society. This period was the period I made my LinkedIn account, I started writing blog posts which I was inspired by my friend. My friend was really into development and had lots of stickers and swags etc. All the time we hear that he is going to this event and that event blah blah blah. I also got to know about GitHub and git in my first semester. I made my account on it and the first response was. “Okay so now that I have made an account, what’s next?? I am so confused and what to do next”. So, I searched ‘what is git and GitHub' and how to use it. I found some long 5 hours of tutorials which are really long for me at that time. So, I watched it completely, and believe me it was one of the best decisions I took.
Now, I got into 2nd semester, here I did Data Science. I got into the GitHub students’ developers program and got 3 months of free DataCamp course. I took the data science path and completed the whole course in it. Now, what was the next step? Do Kaggle. I got into Kaggle and started exploring it. Now, I am confused and don’t know how to start. I am at the stage where I have some knowledge but I don’t know how to apply it in Kaggle. I tried and tried but didn’t get it. So, I moved out from it which is still valid in December 2022. I hold machine learning and data science and chose to explore some other fields.
By the end of the second semester, covid was over and our classes resumed offline. I went to an offline campus and got to meet with a lot of people. Here, I got to know that I am nowhere near them and I need to learn more and more.
By this time, it was 3rd semester and I could say that it was one of my most productive semesters to date. I started exploring web development and I started with frontend development. I learned about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. All the credits go to YouTube tutorials. I made my portfolio website with basic HTML and CSS. This time I didn’t know what semantic designing is and what is flexbox and grid etc. I just made a not-so-very-responsive website which took me weeks to make. I learned many things as a web developer. But more than that, I gain lots of confidence that I can be a website developer. I took feedback from my friends and then someone told me to take Angela Yu’s course for MERN Stack development.
I started that course and I got to learn many things about full-stack development. I learned about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Express JS, Node JS, React and MongoDB, etc. I made many projects along with the course which helped me in gaining more confidence as a web developer. I also explored a lot of other courses on youtube, went to meetups, met with different people, and explored the developers' community. I also contributed to some open-source projects, especially during hacktoberfest 2022. I am going to contribute more in the coming programs also.
In my third semester, I joined many clubs, gave interviews with many clubs and chapters, and started using social media professionally. I started getting active on Twitter which is a very good platform ( at least till December 2022 ). I also started exploring blockchain, content writing, DSA, etc.
One thing, which I started neglecting was my college studies, which during my end-semester exams taught me well. I thought a lot about the education system in my college and all I concluded is that the courses they teach are really important for a developer to learn but their goal which is to teach for exams spoils the beauty of the subject. As we get is few hours of classes and a lot of syllabi to study before exams which pop out after every few weeks. But nonetheless, we cannot do anything about it. These are some of the things which we.
So, right now I have started my 4th semester. I can see that the fruits of my hard work which I put in during the third semester are going to pay in 4th semester. I am going to work a lot this semester, be it as a content lead for a club, or as a web developer for different events and clubs. I am also going to collaborate with different start-ups in the field of management and content writing. Anyways this is just the beginning of my career, and I still have a lot to explore and learn. I think I am going to learn and get into web3 this semester.
One thing, I found common in many developers is that we are not confident with our skills. Which can be positive and negative in both ways. Like, when you talk to a developer, he/she will tell their skills and will always add what they are building and learning right now.
Thank you for reading my blog so far. If you like it then don’t forget to share your views about it and also don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Bye👋