THE JOURNEY

Not everything I’ve built runs on a server.

The chapters of my life so far — the good days, the hard years, and the people who got me through them.

My mother, father, grandmother, sister and me, at ten.

PROLOGUE · PATRATU, JHARKHAND

Before the code, there was home.

This is our first family photo. Home was a small house, barely big enough for two people, let alone five. There wasn’t much space and there wasn’t much money, but there was always family. Nobody before me had worked in technology. I would be the first to fall for it.

CHAPTER 01 · PATRATU, JHARKHAND · AGE 15 · CURIOUS

A borrowed keyboard and my father’s phone

It started at fifteen, with my father’s phone and a keyboard I borrowed from a friend. I plugged it in and typed out the Python programs from our school textbooks, one line at a time, on a screen made for messages. Not many people around me shared this. Through school I had one or two friends who really understood it, and mostly I figured things out alone. At twenty-one, I finally built a proper setup at home. This is that desk. It took six years to get from a borrowed keyboard to it.

You don’t need the right tools to start. You start with whatever you have.

CHAPTER 02 · CHANDIGARH · 2021–2025 · GRATEFUL

Four years, one scholarship, and a loan worth every rupee

Leaving home was sad, but every step away made me surer of the decision. Chandigarh University gave me the best days of my student life, and friends I’m still in touch with today. Getting through wasn’t easy. Even with a 50% merit scholarship, my family couldn’t cover the rest of the fees, so I took an education loan to finish my degree. My proudest moment was Anidex, a Flutter app I built that identifies animals from your camera, like a small Google Lens for animals. The first time it worked, I knew this was what I wanted to do.

When your family gives everything to get you there, you make every semester count.

CHAPTER 03 · AHMEDABAD · 2025 · ON MY OWN

A lonely city and my first real bug

I was the first in my close friend group to land an off-campus offer: a Flutter internship in Ahmedabad, where I ended up in the backend team. The city was lonely. I’m an introvert, and after office and on weekends there was no one to talk to. The stipend was small, so I took part-time shifts as a picker at quick-commerce dark stores to cover my needs and help at home. Then came my first real production bug. Real users were affected, and I fixed it. That was the moment I stopped feeling like a student and started feeling like a developer.

The day you fix a real user’s problem is the day you stop feeling like a student.

CHAPTER 04 · 2025 · LOST

Seven months that tested everything

After the internship, I took a break to learn AI and build a career in it. I thought it would take a month or two to find a job. It took seven. An education loan to repay, pressure from family, pressure about my career, money running out. Every rejection asked the same question: was I even meant for coding? Should I try something else? I didn’t know what else, so I kept learning and kept building, one small thing at a time.

Doubt doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong road. Sometimes the road is just long.

CHAPTER 05 · GURUGRAM · 2025 – NOW · BACK ON TRACK

I never chose backend. Backend chose me.

It happened twice. At my internship, I joined for Flutter and landed in the backend team. After the break, I joined as an AI engineer, and within a few months my backend and infrastructure work moved me into backend as an SDE-1. This time I didn’t resist it. I started enjoying it: the queues, the caches, the systems that have to hold up when thousands of people show up at once. The moment I knew I could do this was when Mentors Buddy went live, StudyIQ’s mentorship platform, whose backend I built end to end on my own. Today I own 20+ services, and I’m still learning every day.

Somewhere along the way, I started choosing it back.

CHAPTER 06

Still being written.

If any of this felt familiar, I’d love to hear your story too.

Say hello