i've wanted to write this down for a while. not because my path is unusual — it isn't, really — but because almost none of it happened alone. parents who backed me before i had proof. teachers who stayed after class. friends who pulled all-nighters beside me. strangers on the internet who reviewed my code. i'm grateful to all of them, even the ones who'll never read this.

in 2021 i joined the pre-university course at rgukt — math, physics, computer science. getting in still feels like luck: rank 967 out of 73,500+ in the state entrance. i didn't walk in confident. mostly i was a kid hoping i wouldn't waste the seat someone else might have used better. those two years were quiet work. textbooks, exams, a lot of doubt. i finished with a 9.7 cgpa, and i know that's a number — but what i remember is the people who explained things twice without making me feel small.

b.tech in computer science started in 2023, and something shifted. college stopped being something that happened to me. i got to help build things other students actually used — campus infra, ornate'26 — and that was the first time code felt heavy in a good way. not because i was clever, but because real people depended on it. the wins were shared. the bugs were shared too. that's when i started to understand what building software actually means.

hackathons were humbling in the best way. zenith, sidhardha, hackbyte — some we won, some we didn't. what stuck wasn't the trophies. it was teammates who argued with me at 2am and laughed with me by morning. docgen gave me my first internship. i showed up nervous; people there treated my mistakes like lessons, not failures. that kindness changed how i write code today.

outside coursework i tried to stay present on campus — techxcel, helping hands, whatever extracurricular thing needed a pair of hands. it kept me grounded when screens got too loud. i started a youtube channel mostly talking to myself. a few hundred people subscribe now, which still feels absurd. i earned my first independent income from work someone chose to pay for, and that mattered less for the money and more because it meant someone trusted me.

lately i'm freelancing — abc chess takes most of my mornings. i also contribute to mozilla fxa when i can; open source reminds me that good work often comes from people you'll never meet, improving things for free. i'm still picking at distributed systems and quantum crypto because both scare me a little, and that's usually a sign i should keep going.

this chapter isn't finished. i'm still figuring out what kind of engineer i want to be, and that's okay. if you read this far — thank you. for the chances, the patience, the hard feedback, the quiet support. whatever comes next, i hope i remember to say thank you more often than i already do.