I’ve spent several months pondering and going back and forth on how I want to present this blog; should it be a developer blog or a personal blog? It drove me crazy to the point that I didn’t post anything simply because I couldn’t choose the tone of how I wanted to write!
But, now I’ve decided. It’s going to be a good (hopefully) mix of both! Here’s the start of my developer journey, mixed with a whole lot of whys!
The Urge
That almost never existed. There I was… I’d screwed up my Pre University exams and I’d joined what I believed was the worst degree college ever for a course that I believed I would grow to regret: Bachelor of Computer Applications (BCA). After the first two days, I knew that the college was going to be useless for me. In an instant, I visualized my future: working night shifts for a support ticket team and being yelled at by my supervisor for not staying late enough.
A shiver went down my spine. I absolutely NEVER wanted that. But, this college was famous for putting their students into companies like that if companies dropped by for campus recruitment. Only a handful would be chosen as developers. And everyone wanted to be a part of that handful, somehow.
I wanted neither.
Somehow, nobody that I met in my batch thought along the lines that I did: I wanted to be the guy that runs the company that sends a team of HRs to colleges to hire recruits. I didn’t want to do support. I didn’t want to be a Rockstar developer either! I wanted to run the whole show.
I’d grown to understand my own personality. I couldn’t and wouldn’t take orders. Not from friends, family, or any kind of elders. I trusted my gut and my gut always told me the right thing to do. Eight years later, I can still vouch for this. There’s nothing wrong with working for anyone else … I just didn’t want to do it when I had an idea of my own.
Luckily for me, when the idea hit, I had a lot of spare time to experiment with how I needed to go about working on it. Should I build a basic prototype? Should I design a mockup first to visually understand what I’m building? Once the mockups are done, what tools I do use to actually build the prototype?
I didn’t Google it. I didn’t ask anyone about how to do it, not even my teachers. I just did what I thought would help me.
I went out and got myself a whiteboard, a few whiteboard markers, and began drawing basic wireframes. I followed those up with general data structures of how I imagined different entities and components of the project itself. It took me a few weeks to finalize the architecture itself and finally, I was ready to code it. Here was my first challenge.
Languages
Now, I had no one to tell me what language to build it in. It had to be a web language because my idea needed to be built on the internet and Google gave me more options than I liked. There were easy ways that could cause problems later on. There were difficult frameworks that could ease my work later on. I didn’t want to care about the “later on”. I wanted to bring my idea to life in the fastest and most efficient way possible.
I searched online for what famous companies were using as their tech stack and Facebook was using PHP back then. They were growing in popularity everyday and I thought, “why not?”
In college, they had taught me SQL and MySQL, but only by working on SQL tools directly. We never had to query a database through a specific language. As I learnt PHP, I realized that a very popular database that went hand in hand with it was MySQL. I was in no way good at it and I don’t think I even understood how to write a SELECT statement back then. But, I pushed myself to start using that as part of my architecture. I mean, I had to start somewhere!
I began learning PHP at tizag.com. It’s a nice little site that teaches you the basics of a language. No framework, just the language. No data structures, just the absolute basics and it was more than enough fuel for me.
In almost no time, I’d set up login and account creation modules. The code was filled with repeated blocks of code but obviously, I didn’t know that then. All I cared about was the text in the logo that looked at me on the screen each time I reloaded the page: Binox.
I was going to have to get used to seeing that a lot. After all, it was the start of something amazing.
The Start.
Read the next part: How to start a failure startup — The First Mistake.
