So I know the left guy in the above image makes you feel that he is already a prodigy or a gifted 10x dev. But no he is not, he might be even programming less than the guy beside him but in the end, he is more productive.

Hi, been a while since I have written stuff in here. This post is about a change in my approach towards programming. I have been programming since I was 10, and I am few weeks away from turning 17 now. So yea, I have some “experience” in programming. My first two years in programming was just me making very simple apps and not thinking much about programming. I made very simple and random things like random number guesser, rock paper scissors, and the hardest thing I did was creating a weather app. I did not get that much serious about programmimng till the pandemic hit in early 2020.

Getting Serious About It

Four years ago, when I meant getting better at programming, I meant getting stuck in a tremendous tutorial hell. It was a very grim time, I will admit, as all I was doing was prgramming non sense projects from youtube but then not being able to do it myself, this repeated for a very extended period of time, a period of time that was way longer than I would like to admit. I was not becoming the next big MERN stack guru by watching yet another programming roadmap to 50lpa. I was under this facade of confidence which was being crushed the moment I stepped out on the field, on my own. I was only getting good at following, not creating. It was a constant oscillation between the “Mount Stupid” and the “Valley of Despair”.

In 2021 and 2022, while still doing React, I was able to slowly create things on my own and started to finally settle in as a frontend dude. But of course, I was getting bored, and in March of 2022, as I was losing interest in computers as a whole, I discovered

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Linux and School

In 2022, I discovered Arch Linux and I felt my interest for computers reignite and burn brighter than ever. As I was a frontend dev, I quickly got into ricing and got again into python for making scripts, C for customizing dwm and Lua for customizing awesomewm. This made me get into computers back, the entirety of 2022 was spent doing wacky stuff with the display of my arch install, I broke it multiple times, I fixed it, sometimes had to reinstall it, but I was having fun.

In 2023, I made maybe one of the best gambits ever, I changed my school and the exposure to tech I got there was immense. I was the part of the school club, and the people I met through my school’s compeition (like ni5arga) was amazing and only boosted my morale to get better in tech and get me into a programming spree sort of. But there was an obstacle, JEE.

Due to JEE which is in 2025, I was not able to give much time to programming as JEE is a higher priorty task than programming, the time I got was not enough to master something but then I found myself in a zone way better.

It Should Be Fun

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From 2024, I have only created project thats I myself find interesting to make, like text editor, url shorterners from complete scratch in C and htmx, neural networks or sometimes even small little utilities such as palette generator. All of these projects are made with no external dependencies (subtle small flex). Right now I am working on biotrack.

I am now just programming for fun. I just think of a project, pick a random language and start coding in it. I may not understand the language (like Rust), but it is a new challenge for me that I am willing to take. But programming experience peaked for me when I started to program in

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C geniunely made me love programming. The amount of things you can do with such a minimal feature set is mindblowing. This is what I thought Rust was bad at, keeping it simple. There are so many inbuilt things in Rust, it is very hard for me feeble brain to comprehend. But I guess that is what you get, in exchange of a truly memory safe language. I made a password game discord bot as my first project to C and I was blown away with its simplicity, which led to me to make this meme

Right now, I am way beyond the Valley Of Despair, I am not a prodigy, I am not a 10x dev, I am not a MERN stack guru, I am just a guy who likes to program. Honestly, I would be on the middle of slope of englightenment, I am not a master of anything, I am not a beginner of anything, I am just a guy who likes to program. I am not a tryhard, I am an enjoyer.

Update, The Primeagen, posted this on twitter, and I think it is very relevant to this post