The idea of documenting your progress may not occur to a lot of folks. But think about it.
On the long run, we might not remember these small moments that changed our life.
Computer Science was just another subject in high school. Programming first hit me as amusing when my friend showed me a cpp program online that rained characters on the black screen. For the average student learning to add numbers with a program, this felt like a really amazing thing to do.
Learning how this interesting program worked enabled me to write better programs.
Armed with this information, making programs that did interesting stuff felt easy to do.
I wasn’t accessing the network or doing file i/o a lot but I just knew it was possible.
The first interesting thing I did was make a script that could record my input with time.
I didn’t think it would go on to be the Diary that I use even today.
The program simply recorded the time at which the key hit the board and stored it into a text file.
Playing the recorded text with the exact time delay made it feel like someone was really typing it down.
This went on into a lot of things I did: Programs wishing Happy Birthday, programs that Typed out menus … so on.
It was fun.
By the time I was pleased with what I could do with a computer, I wanted to make it talk. It felt like an interesting challenge that was cool.
My approach was to build a dictionary of Words and all verbs and its tenses. This made me build a cpp data file with the entire collection of English verbs and their conjugations.
It was a failure when the intelligence required to put the English together didn’t work out. But I learnt a lot of cpp and later realized that what I had built was a primeval database.
In college, I focused most on accumulating every knowledge I could about Computers.
With the plenty of information available all around my attention and interest were scattered all around the place and the most natural thing to do was ingest all of it. So I learned a lot about programming, internet networks and all that.
We learned programming paradigms, languages like C, CPP, Java, PHP, SQL, Python and also Visual Basic. We learned some theory about Computer Networks, a bunch of maths. To some extent this served the curiosities but it wasn’t entertaining me much.
When you learning everything all at once, you don’t understand any of it in further detail.
This wasn’t enough. I wanted to build things.
We took on a couple of projects small and big, this helped to serve as passive income while equally helping us learn more about running a website and implementing logic for various scenarios.
I also worked on my personal projects and I wish I did a lot more of that.
By the time Python gained fame, I was building more scripts again.
I didn’t focus a lot on web development at the time, so I built projects that mainly focused on logic.
Projects like Diary, Mixie and LanChat helped me work on my programming logic.
When the COVID pandemic happened and the world went into lockdown, I utilized the extra hours I gained from not having to travel around to do an online course from Harvard introducing me to AI.
College had broadened my minds about what was possible with software, but learning about AI was quite a game changer.
My dreams and plans changed, the possibilities opened up.
ChatGPT didn’t exist then and the hype around AI was just gaining momentum. I learned a lot about how it all worked but by the time I was ready to fully put my knowledge into experiments it was time to graduate.
I found a job soon and the passage of time was never the same again.
If I were to progress with my prior dreams and projects, I had to find time for my projects.
I built ProTracker to keep a track on my to-do list. This was a learning experience in terms of the Product Development and processes involved.
I also built a Reinforcement Learning environment for a chess playing algorithm I wanted to build in the hopes that I’d work on it soon.
I did more experiments in the time I could find and decided to document myself in a more structured way.
And here we are, saying “Hello World”.
. . .
madhaven
20240618