I picked engineering on a rumour
My father is a civil engineer — a building contractor — so for most of my childhood civil engineering was the only kind of engineering I knew existed. I had no idea what software was, or what a B.Tech in it would mean. I dropped a year to prepare for JEE mostly because that was what you did.
It worked. I got into Delhi Technological University, formerly Delhi College of Engineering, and picked Mathematics and Computing because people said that branch made money. That is the entire reasoning. It happened to be right, but not because I knew anything.
Then I tried everything except the thing I was studying
College started in 2020, which meant two years of it happened over video calls. No campus, no friends in the room, no environment where anyone was building anything. So I went looking for one somewhere else.
A best friend and I started a social media agency. We never got around to naming it. I was the face of it — meetings, pitches, consulting on engagement and reach, running ads for clients. There were two or three of us and no company, but people paid us and we learned to talk to businesses.
Then I started Yorshop: buying clothes wholesale from Gandhi Nagar and Sarojini and reselling them on Meesho, back when Meesho was new. I put in about a lakh and got about a lakh back. No profit, no real loss. I had a bestseller with a margin too thin to matter and returns eating whatever was left, and I ran out of capital before I could fix either. That is where I learned that volume is not a business — unit economics is.
Somewhere in there I also tried transcription, freelancing, video editing, content, the stock market and athlete marketing. Nearly none of it was code. My coursework was — data structures, algorithms, C++, OOP — but the building instinct went everywhere except software.
I missed the placements
I could not sit for campus placements. A family situation mattered more, and that is as much as belongs on a website. DTU's placements are excellent. I watched them happen from the outside and assumed my career had gone off the rails before it started.
So I aimed lower and sideways. I taught myself Excel and Power BI and decided to try getting in as a data analyst, on the theory that I had been away from code too long to compete for a developer role.
Hyderabad, six months, four hours of sleep
In April 2025 I moved to Hyderabad on a friend's suggestion and lived in a PG for about six months. Walk-in interviews, preparation all night, four or five hours of sleep. I had never lived away from home before. The food tasted wrong and I missed my family constantly.
The offers I got wanted two- and three-year bonds at thirteen to sixteen thousand a month. That was not enough to live on and the lock-in was longer than my degree had taken to matter. I turned them down, which at the time felt like arrogance I could not afford.
What I actually took away from that stretch was blunter than a lesson: nobody is coming to help you. You are your own support. I was there so that the people at home would eventually be alright, and that was the whole reason to keep going.
A phone call, and then a year of being handed things
In August 2025 a friend from college called about a frontend role at Teknomee. They needed someone for HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I mentioned I also knew Python, so they interviewed me for full-stack instead, and I got it.
My first commit was on 22 August 2025. It was a theme toggle button. Ten weeks later I was designing an activity-log schema with migrations. In January I was writing a security scanner API in FastAPI. By June I was making analytics migrations against a column store and working in a spam-guard library.
Then a site went down and nobody noticed for hours, and I ended up in infrastructure — one exporter on one server, then Prometheus and Grafana across roughly twenty-five machines, then blackbox probes on the sites themselves and alerts that arrive in seconds. One morning a dashboard I built showed a customer-facing site in red before any customer had complained. That is still the moment I am proudest of.
None of it was planned. Every one of those was somebody handing me a thing I had not done before, and me deciding to find out. That has turned out to be the actual skill.
Where I am
I have been in Bengaluru for about a month, in Marathahalli. I moved here deliberately: my friends here work at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, AMD and Myntra, and being near people who are further along than me is the fastest way I know to stop being the most experienced person in a room of four.
I am a generalist. I know a lot of surface and I am going deeper on the parts I want to be known for — CI/CD, infrastructure, and how systems behave when they are under real load. That is the direction I am moving in, and it is deliberate this time.