My Journey In The Tech So Far #MyDevStory #GDSAugust

Hi everyone!👋I am Shashank and I will be sharing my journey into the world of Tech, writing my "Hello World" program, and many more through this blog. Before I even jump into the story, a quick reminder for all of you to drink enough water and stay hydrated :)

Put your seatbelts on and let's get started!

I was not a 12-year prodigy who started coding at a very young age but I was a bright student in my school days who wanted to excel in everything I took up; at least my parents did. I was put in every extracurricular activity from a very young age starting from Singing, Painting, Chess, and Karate (I have a black belt) to name some.

You don't want to mess with me, do you? 😮‍💨😎

As I started moving to high school I had to leave everything behind, except for Chess which I still play a lot. I got to know more about computers, and… hold on just a min. Unlike what you are thinking, I did not learn how to code at that particular time. I just painted in MS Paint and used Excel sheets, and MS Powerpoint as a part of our Computer Lab course in school. I literally hated them so much and about Excell? I'm sorry, I still hate you🫣.

And me being Indian, like all the 10th pass out students would do, I started preparing for JEE examination. For all the non-Indians, you can call it an entrance test of MIT of India. Nope, my parents did not force me to prepare for JEE, I took it on myself just so that I didn't want to feel like stupid in front of my friends. Like "bro, you're an Indian wanting to do engineering and not gonna prepare for JEE?" I did not want anyone to say that to me lol.

And did I prepare well for the exams? Hell Nahhh. Did I clear JEE? Hell Nahhh.

Did you get the meme? No, me neither.

After the exams, I knew that I was gonna do engineering with a CS major, so started preparing early. I bought a Udemy course on Python. I wrote my first "Hello World" in it. And unlike all my pending courses, I did finish it within a couple of months but I forgot everything except how to print in Python, because of the unstructured way of learning.

I got into a tier-3 college, where I learned C programming in my first semester of college. No offense, but C sucks, and in the 2nd semester, I was introduced to his brother, C++ which I liked by the way. Along with that, in my 2nd semester, I started learning Data Structures and Algorithms in Java from Kunal I loved the way he taught and instantly started liking DSA a lot. Later I started doing LeetCode problems and I still do :) It's fun, you should try some of those. Then the Covid hit, and things changed. Everything became digital- the classes, exams, and so on. But that did not stop me from exploring.

I came to know about this language called Julia by Logan Kilpatrick. Tried out for a week or so but gave up learning the language because at that time it was not popular and only selected resources were available. As Wikipedia says, Julia is a high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language. While it is a general-purpose language and can be used to write any application, many of its features are well suited for numerical analysis and computational science.

You can read more about Julia here

One fine day, I saw this video on Youtube on how to get "Free Swags" from HactoberFest.

Who does not like free goodies?

So I followed all the steps as mentioned in the video and boom! 2 months later, I received a mail saying that I won a T-shirt!

I was so excited about receiving my first free swag but, it did not go as planned. In the mail, I was asked to click the link to fill my shipping address and redirected to GitHub but turned out that my GitHub account got flagged! I had literally no idea how that happened. So, I went on to check the same video if I had missed any step, but guess what, the video was down! Apparently, the contribution which was shown in the video was spam. I was shattered because it was my first swag. Fast forward, two months later my Github account got unflagged after writing so many emails. That's when I found Eddie Jaodue who actually taught me what open-source truly is and how to make a legitimate contribution. I eventually made my first pull request in this project. This is how I got into the space of open source and made my first pull request.

"Collaboration First, Code Second" - Eddie Joude

Within a jiffy, my first year ended just like that. Now I wanted to explore development. I chose Web Development and started learning it. Of course, there are 100s of free resources out there on the internet, but I chose the Udemy course so that everything will be in a structured format. Loved it! 10/10 to Colt Steele for making this course. Web development felt overwhelming at first, but now I really like it a lot. I started building mini-projects, CRUD applications, and so on.

Then I came to know about the Showwcase platform which I signed up for just like any other platform. But, I did not anticipate what lay ahead. I joined Showwcase quite early as a normal fellow developer and started posting content regularly. I started to gain followers which made me feel really happy. I truly felt that there are people who loved my content and that encouraged me to write/post something for them in the community. The community was so encouraging that I felt it was a safe place to share what I build, learn, and so on freely without any hesitation.

And, Surprise! Surprise! I received my first swags from Showwcase as a part of a challenge.

My blogging journey started as a part of the #4weekshows challenge in Showwcase where 4 blogs/shows had to be written in 4 weeks. I did not complete the challenge and ended up writing only one blog which got a lot of attention. To my surprise, I got reached out by a person on LinkedIn to write a blog on their website. And that inspired me to write more blogs. I would not be writing this blog if I did not join Showwcase and I'm grateful for it. This will be my 4th blog and I'm super happy writing about it.

That's all about my story on getting into tech and all about my journey with it. With that said, do share your journey so that it inspires many young developers out there who are confused and need a path to follow.

I will be focusing more on writing technical blogs and improving upon them, building projects, and preparing for internships!

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Have a great day! Happy Learning!