Journey into Tech

My journey into tech began when I came to Earth..just kidding. I was born here. Don't get angsty.

I used to go to these Computer Expos that were organised every month, with my Dad. I used to go gaga over the steering wheels, joysticks and what not, computers were big, bulky instruments. It brought me a lot of joy watching machines with some sort of intelligence. My dad bought our first PC in 2011, and the first thing I did was play songs on it. It was a bulky PC, but it came with a lot of accessories, Woofers, speakers and a printer. I don't remember the first song played on it though.

After we got the PC, I still went to Expos and went gaga over steering wheels, I never got one, but I did purchase Counter Strike 1.6; which I played a lot. Then I discovered piracy and started going to friends' homes and getting them to transfer games to the 4gb Pendrive. Oh yes, I had a pen drive. I also burned a lot of CDs, Nero, you see. The pendrive progression went like this: I got a black 2gb sandisk pd, then I got a white 4gb one, and then I got another white 16gb one. All had viruses in them. Fun times.

One day, I got the game GTA Vice City and my life changed, the whole day I drove a tank in the game, what days. I also had all the cheat codes written on a piece of paper, what days. I moved on to NFS after that. What fun. Every kid's foray in tech has been through games.

After some time we got the Internet, and I once deleted the driver. My bad.

Internet was slow, 256kbps, but it was fun, fb and all that. I sent and received some friend requests but that was the end of it. Social Media was my new friend. I used wikipedia for all my school projects. I had GTA Sanandreas burnt on a DVD. I was the king.

Days passed by, the computer expo started to get boring, I was way advanced than the expo could ever be. Internet opened gates that I didn't knew existed, like I never in my wildest dreams thought that a Nigerian Prince would contact me and ask for help. Crazy.

Months passed by, I got the MTS high speed internet, it was v expensive, but so fast. Websites used to load in under 2 seconds. I was flabbergasted. I could do intra day trading or so I thought, turns out the share market is a scam run by the illuminati. Who'd have thought. It was so fast, but ate so much data, 4gb of monthly data used to be exhausted in 1 week.

Years passed by, then came the revolution of Jio, and wait. I think missed some time in between. I programmed that turtle to make a square in school and also drew flow charts. Did some Cpp on that blue screen IDE. It was fun all in all.

Then came the cheap internet and I downloaded pirated NFS MW on my mobile and such a good game, I loved it. What graphics.

I joined the IT branch and I was firm in my resolve to get the computers to do my bidding. Become a powerful computer user who would rule the Indian subcontinent with the help of computers. Twist.

I went to college and did more coding, turns out if you want to get a job you had to solve code puzzles and I thought wow this is some next level scheme. I solved leetcode questions. I got traumatised. (I do understand the perspective of the industry though, it is a good filter). I also did play lot of new games, like CoD MW 1, 2, 3, CoD Black Ops, and what not, but those were times of Pubg and multiplayer games so I played them too. My mobile was not that powerful so Pubg used to lag a lot. But at some point I overcame the gaming thing. Now I have a Mac so I cannot really play anything lmao.

I went to study data science and built colourful graphs using matplotlib. I didn't much enjoy doing that though.

What days. Then I got employed and everything changed. I was building APIs, doing system design, product things and all that. Worked on mostly early stage products.

Did I tell you we used to write code on paper? Wonderful thing. Helped one think. Writing code is thinking. I was the kid who used to submit all his assignments on time, but there came a time when I stopped studying for tests and used to score like 1-2 marks out of 15 :P But I did code so that made up for things.

The thing that intrigues me about tech is how it drastically improves our lives, not social media and short form content, it is a plague out there and our IQs are being reduced by big Social Media companies and we should protest against it. With AI our lives will become easier. Let's see.