My Programming journey
Tags: webdev, discuss, writing
Published: 2023-05-01 16:35:01

Alright so here you are welcome to this blog where I tell you what I had been doing for past few years. In this blog, I will be sharing my experiences, challenges, and successes as I navigate the vast and ever-evolving world of programming. Through this blog, I hope to connect with like-minded individuals and inspire others to pursue their own programming journeys. So, sit back, grab a cup of coffee, and join me on this exciting adventure!

**Let's see how it all started,**
It was a dark and stormy night, and I was procrastinating on YouTube, watching funny cat videos when, out of nowhere, I stumbled upon a channel called [Brackeys](https://www.youtube.com/user/Brackeys). Little did I know that this was going to change my life forever. I downloaded Unity and started following Brackeys' tutorials, feeling like a pro at first, but then slowly realizing that I had no idea what I was doing. 

Little did I know I was stuck in tutorial hell for two whole F**king years!!

## 1st PU
I gave up on unity and started trying everything.  Literally everything . From Python to Rust, from Django to Flask, and from silly websites to Discord bots. I even dabbled in competitive programming, failing over and over again. 

## 🔐 down
But guess where I landed? In the land of PHP! Yup, you heard that right. I saw a YouTube recommendation from [Yahoo baba](https://www.youtube.com/yahoobaba) and I watched a PHP playlist by Yahoo Baba and spent half of my lockdown building a social media app called Orkut. Why Orkut, you ask? Well, I liked the name, okay? It was vanilla PHP, but I did manage to add authentication and basic CRUD operations, which I called "posts".

In the second half of lockdown, I moved on to Laravel and Vue.js, and that's when I built [Waddle](https://github.com/tejas-gk/waddle) , a monolithic application. This was the first project I did without relying too much on tutorials, and let's just say that I finally got out of tutorial hell.



## College

## 1st year

I went to college and met a [Legend](https://github.com/Deveesh-Shetty) . Everyone might either be jack of all trades and master of none or master of one but never both . But this guy is master of all trades. With him on my side we completed many cool projects together. It sure does help when your friends have same interest as you.

> There is always a bigger fish 

![Markdown previewer](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tw1bovwykv3x9bwpjjpe.png)
This is markdown previewer built with alpine js

![weather app](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/yfcktnkbdnyn05ym5m9k.png)
weather app

After all these projects I thought I could build Waddle even better So I built Guild with nextjs on frontend and Laravel on backend. I also discovered Tailwind around this time.

![Guild](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/iwbp7wfid2x2fwsq5tvx.png)

As a responsible human being, I also tried my best to pass in college. It wasn't easy though, especially when I had to balance my coursework with my programming projects. 

One time, I stayed up all night to finish a coding project, and by the time I submitted it, the sun was already up. I looked like a zombie with dark circles under my eyes, and my teacher probably thought I was pulling an all-nighter partying. Little did he know that I was just having a coding marathon with myself.

## 2nd year

We collaborated in a team of 3 members to develop a project for a specific company and designed and implemented APIs to create Realtime location-based system using leafletjs resulting in winning 1st place in the competition showcasing project to company
Hackathon 

![Devhost hackathon](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/rae6xecvm3bz8xtkceb7.jpeg)

yeah that guy on the right is me. We spent around 30 hours without sleep just working on project. Our hard work paid off and more importantly we got lots of experience and knowledge on team work

I started hopping into frontend [Frontend mentor](https://www.frontendmentor.io/profile/tejas-gk) was a major help to me without which I wouldn't have gotten better at frontend.
actually most of my small projects can be found here in [UILib](https://github.com/tejas-gk/UiLib)
Here are some other things built thanks to frontend mentor
![rock paper scissors](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/nzyjhud89gsd6h85lkzb.png)

##### rock paper scissors

 ![space tourism](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/mp31db71k4yfx8lmcaz1.png)
##### space tourism

 I know I still have a long way to go before I become the programming wizard I aspire to be. I'm still nowhere near where I want to be.

So, there you have it, folks. My  programming journey that started with me watching YouTube videos and ended up with me building cool projects.

Hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did!