Hello World

Now that you’ve clicked on this, it can only be because you want to hear the full extended uncut version of my inception into this field. Here it is, as much as I can remember it.

There are two parts to it: life before May 2020 and life after it. I can’t recall the before life as much. The crux of it: I wanted to be a doctor, a neurosurgeon to be specific:

Let’s take it back to the time when I cleared that competitive exam. That’s when things took a turn. The results were announced on 13 March 2020. My name was there. I could see it.Serial no. 117 and rank 29 on the JSTSE examination 2019-2020.

I took a deep breath. My parents were informed about it by the school authorities. I think that moment also played out a crucial role as this was a switch that flipped inside them, they never questioned me about my studies or pushed me towards a certain goal ever again.

After a month or so, around April 2020, I sat with this thought of “what if I didn’t have the resources (my parents, their support and their hard earned money) to prepare for this?”, “what if there are hundreds of other students who don’t even get the mere chance of having a fair attempt at this exam?“, “this seems barbaric, what did I do to deserve this merit?” This made me a little vulnerable about my achievement. I had to do something about it.

Well, it resulted in two very life-changing behaviors, my utmost empathetic behaviour of doing the absolute best for the underprivileged people around me.

Not many people know about this mission (congratulations, you’re one of the lucky ones). And also a self-compounding self-sabotage behaviour that would take me a massive 6 years to overcome.

And so I started to put together a plan to collect material, prepare resources and setup a platform so affordable, it would cost only 0.086% of what the commercial enterprises charged. 0.00086 times of ₹X that is. I had no clue nor the intention to get into engineering at the time.

My naive first-principles brain suggested setting all of this up on Telegram and selling my courses there. I set up an account and also a group. The base was ready.

But only one mistake, I had accidentally set my account’s phone number to my actual phone number. And if you know, Telegram sends an auto-notification to all your contacts that “XYZ joined Telegram!“. The only issue that XYZ was “JSTSEGuru” (which translates to the exam name + guru which means a subject matter expert).

A name that I feel extremely proud of today. I built it from the ground up, with my bare hands and took it to the feat of becoming a fully profitable venture with 1000+ students over the span of 3 years.

But at the time, I was vulnerable (as mentioned before) and one of my classmates noticed it. I still remember what she said: “jstseguru 😹”. Maybe her intentions weren’t bad. But still, it crushed me to the core. I don’t need to explain why.

I went to the room next to me where my brother was, and showed him the chat. He said just one thing that sticks with me till now: “Do you think people of your age would even fathom thinking about what you’re attempting to do?”.

Although that’s a negative way to cope with something, I’d still defend him on this.

So I kept working on this platform until the start of May 2020. Remember I wrote my first line of code on 26 May 2020. Yes we haven’t reached that point yet, but we’re very close.

So I decided to showcase all the material/resources I had rounded up and also the Telegram platform I had created.

I was expecting some appreciation, and you would’ve guessed it right, like all mothers, I got instant love showers and appreciation from my mother. She’s so cute. And it was my father who said “Why don't you just make a website for it?”

“Huh? Wait you can make one? Don't they just...exist? Like who do I call at Google to get a website? Which office hands out URLs?”

That’s something I thought in my mind. He then said he knows a website developer who could help build one.

I was like, sure if he can pull this off, my business would look even more legit. Before we move forward, one piece of advice: “businesses and social causes don’t mix well.”

That’s a different story but I eventually chose the latter, but that in itself has a twist.

Well, turns out, as bad as a designer I was, he was even worse of a front-end engineer. Sorry, Mr. Yashwant (I hope he doesn’t read this).

The “wireframe” I sent him was absolutely completely different from what he made.

On top of that, when I asked him to at least build the login portion for my dashboard that had the sensitive material and was now lying naked, he responded with “actually that would make the website a lot more dynamic.”

Maybe he meant, “I don’t know that part” (that I later discovered is called backend) or subtly hinting at “I’ve already enough, don’t expect more”.

But judging his skills, I am pretty confident it was the former. Anyways, when life gives you lemons, press the bitter fruit into a luminous, sparkling, sunlit, golden syrup called lemonade. And that’s exactly what I did.

And so a future doctor opened the notepad app on his 14-inch, Intel Core i3-1005G1, 4GB DDR4 RAM, 256GB NVMe SSD, Windows 10 Laptop. How hard could it be? I just need to fix some colors, and also bring the text to center. That’s like a few clicks on Google Docs.

This was the very first line and first time I touched code. It was 26 May 2020 on this day. But like any other life story, there’s always the dirty middle.

The part where the novelty fades, where the only sound of clapping is your own, where only victory is that you got through another day.

The next few months were just that. By the time the frontend part was done, it was September 2020. And here’s the V1 I got ready with:

It was now time for the “dynamic stuff”. I knew I had to first build a login system for it. A way that I could protect my paid resources from the guest users. So got back to work was a half-engineer, half-doctor.

“Login system hmmm. There must be some pre-built code for this, I can use that maybe and then tweak some stuff in it and it would work. How hard would it be?”

That sentence has become my mindset. I guess being naive also comes with the conviction to achieve anything in this world, anything. The hardest part is getting started; being naive gets you past that stage.

You see, the backend is “dynamic”, if an engineer of that caliber and experience (that’s what I thought at the time) said “it would make the website dynamic”, then it means I needed to have some coding knowledge.

After a bit of exploration, looking for a YouTube channel, God helped me find just the one. This is the video:

I followed it end to end, I wrote the code exactly as he did. But I guess I might’ve skipped a few seconds here and there because when I tried to run my PHP code, nothing would happen.

And more importantly, my PHP code wasn’t even visible in the devtools. What the hell was going on? I could see HTML, CSS, JS, what happened to my PHP code?

Moreover why was his website working on localhost while mine was running a plain HTML?

Well now you readers know this is why it’s so “dynamic”. After some exploration and numerous questions on Stack Overflow asking “Build an end-to-end login system in PHP for my ed-tech website, it should have a dashboard and...” (which for some reason got removed, I don't know why 🙄).

After a week, I built up enough knowledge to watch and follow the same video again.

It wouldn’t be hard this time. But obviously,even a 5 year old could see the pattern. I was able to too. If it’s me who’s doing the job, there’s no way I can get it done in the first go. And so this time I was a bit better at enduring failures.

I was a bit more resilient. One of my friends (who got an Amazon internship) says: “You’re way too resilient”. I don’t think that’s the case.

But then I also know I can go 15 hours straight while writing out the Raft (the consensus algorithm) without drinking a sip of water (this is true!) so maybe he’s right. Maybe this PHP journey is how I built that skill.

So I started in the morning around 9AM. Gave my mumma a goodbye kiss when she was leaving for work. It’s a 24 minute video.

In almost 30 minutes, I would officially declare myself a backend engineer who can build “secure” login/registration systems. I would beat that “dynamic” guy in his domain. That would be so fricking awesome to watch. Took the video back to 0.

Started again, line by line. I watched him do everything closely. It takes time to read the code and write it by hand, so it took an hour. All the code is copied. Moment of truth…

It did not work. Why? Now I don’t know the error exactly but I know my debugging process was simple: stack overflow → read some code online → watch some similar tutorial → repeat. So I started fixing issues one by one.

The doorbell rang. I knew it was my mom, I could sense it. But that also meant something else. It meant it was 4:30 PM. What. The. Hell.

Okay maybe I agree with my friend on the resilience part.

Obviously that meant a ton of scolding if I hadn’t eaten my lunch. So lunch break it was. But even during that time, I couldn’t shake off the feeling of having something incomplete, the fact that I knew I was very close (I wasn’t) and that it only needed a few things to be fixed and it would work (It absolutely would not).

I finished my lunch, got back to it. My father came back home. They both took some rest. They left again to handle their evening clinic (oh yes, they’re both doctors).

They came back. It was dinner time. And the 24 min video that was supposed to be completed in 1 hour (because you know it takes time to watch the video and write out code by hand 😂) took me almost 12 hours now. It was dinner break now.

I was this close to finishing it off, I was this close to having a login system of my own. Only this time, it was actually true.

9:45PM, we finished our dinner. I got back to work. I had to finish it today. It was bloody supposed to take 24 mins. It’s almost 13 hours now.

As I got closer to the finish line, things started to come together. It felt as if…as if I had been reading a beautifully complex book and only in the final chapter did I understand the prologue.

Three fixes remained (I had zero clue). First one down. Second down. Only one remaining. Oh maybe MySQL’s field name must match the attribute that I am targeting via my PHP code. Maybe this could work. And…it did.

Hitting the login button ONLY with the correct credentials led me into my private dashboard. It worked. I ran to my mom in her bedroom who was about to sleep. It was almost 11 PM. I showed her what I had built.

I said: “Mumma, I did it. See, if I use the correct credentials, it allows me, but with the wrong one it does not. And the reason it wasn’t working was that I was using a different field name in the table of this MySQL database and using a different one to make a fetch query via my PHP code”.

She smiled and gave me a big tight hug. Obviously, what would she even say? "Nice."? She might have not understood 99% of the stuff I told her.

But that hug and that smile meant the world to me. It was the only appreciation I ever wanted. To a 16 year old, almost-engineer, it was the biggest trophy, the biggest reward, the biggest achievement I will ever have in my life.

I went back to my room and I cried my fucking eyes out. I finally did what I thought was impossible. Thank you mom for the hug, thank you dad for the idea, thank you big bro for the encouragement. And yes, thank you so much Mr. Yashwant for refusing to build the “dynamic” part.

I decided to become an engineer that day.