I was 18 when I first fell in love with programming. It was the summer of 2012, and I had teamed up with a couple of my 1st-year-engineering classmates to build an app for a friend’s nightlife business. The app would allow users to discover parties and browse their photographs. But over the summer holidays, when we were to get working on it, our lead programmer went AWOL and I was suddenly left with no option but to build the app myself.

Back then, I knew absolutely nothing useful about programming, let alone building an app. So everyday, I would walk to college, plonk my laptop on a lonesome table in an empty basement, and google desperately to figure out how to build a— get this — Blackberry app. Remember BB messenger with their BB pins? The kids who attended our client’s parties where all on that shiz.

So there I was, patiently trying to make sense of everything, until one fine day, it finally did. I remember the moment; it was the first time coding felt like magic: I had managed to fetch a JSON string from a web server and display it inside my app.

Woah.

WOAH.

GodDAMN. Like— my brother, what?! This piece of information that lived elsewhere on the internet had been fetched and made to appear inside MY app and on MY command?! GTFO here bro, I am a GOD now.

Meandering

So that was ~12 years ago. Since then, I went on to graduate, start my career as a front-end dev, have my salary tripled in a span of 9 months, and within another year, I was offered a promotion to lead my team.

And then I quit; quit writing code full-time to pursue music. More specifically, to learn the keys, learn music production and dive into the Indian indie music scene to ultimately give a childhood dream of mine a legitimate shot: to become a rapper, ha!

The stories between that life event and now are for another time but in short, I quickly benched my dreams of selling 50 million records, and found myself evolving into a product manager and founder in the exploding D2C brands space in India.

Awakening

Building brands was fun. But working in the space left me disillusioned. I realised that my favourite brands were really just deliberately crafted stories. My world view had transitioned from that of a consumer to a creator.

I also noticed that unless your product is beneficial and significantly better than the rest of the options in its category, all you’re trying to do with your brand, every, waking, day, is convince consumers to purchase your product over someone else’s, i.e. simply sell. Sounds like a classic case of a craftsperson hating sales, eh? But it really wasn’t so much that I hated selling than that I hated selling products I didn’t believe in 100%, especially when it was done using questionable tactics. I was conflicted. And my internal conflicts, along with a bunch of other reasons, prompted me to quit the D2C e-commerce industry and find something more meaningful to do with my life.

Rediscovery

At that point, I was a good jack of many trades: front-end engineer, e-commerce product manager, Shopify developer, brand marketer, fashion shoot producer, designer, and a bunch of other skills I’d dabbled in out of necessity during my entrepreneurial years. And 8 years into my career, I found myself having to figure out what I was to do with the rest of it. Product management? Entrepreneurship? Research? Teaching? How do I decide? I’m a naturally curious person with a strong belief in my ability to do (almost) anything. That probably sounds cool but it also breeds indecision. And coupled with what I strongly suspect is undiagnosed ADHD, I have had to work relentlessly to tame my mind.

This career guide helped. So did my habit of jotting down epiphanies. And after months of contemplation, I finally found my answer: software engineering. I would go back to where I started. Interestingly, the catalyst to making that decision was reconnecting with an old classmate I hadn’t seen in 15 years. Leading up to meeting him, I’d pulled out my old scrapbooks and in one of them, found something I’d written to myself back in 2005. I was 12 years old then. The page had a prompt to write down your ambition and I had written “engineer & author”.

Setting Course

Now that I’ve decided to get back into tech, my first step is to pick up where I left off and catch up with the world as quickly as possible. I was a pretty good front-end engineer back in 2018; working with Backbone, Bootstrap, CoffeeScript, etc. Today React, Tailwind and TypeScript are the go-to stack. And NextJS seems to be rapidly gaining popularity.

I don’t want to simply be a front-end dev again though; I’m now better suited to managing a team. But of course, I need to earn that right. So I have to brush up on fundamentals and learn full-stack dev, system design and scaling infra. And machine learning too. Plus, new workflows using AI tools. It’s a great time to get back into this space, when the nature of software engineering roles are being redefined and learning curves have drastically shortened, all thanks to AI. I’m excited, and on it.

Kick Off

Starting now, I want to develop a habit of writing. I’ll document my progress on this new journey, to consequently push myself to progress quickly. I hope to write everyday. But if I can manage to do it even once a week, consistently, that would be a win. To building momentum. 🥂