I started learning to code back in 2011. I never thought that I would do software engineering as a professional career. I was more into machines or hardware things. I can’t estimate if anyone would ever read this post. Well who cares đ. I am writing this to bury my thoughts into the history of the internet. So it remains there forever.
I was curious about computers when I was a kid around 9-10 years old. Just like all other kids who were born and brought up late 90s and early 2000s. The first language I was introduced to was Logo.
Though I never used that language on a computer. I read about it in a school book and learned that we can make computers do things that we want. After around 2-3 years, I got introduced to C language. As for all of us, the very first program I learned was to write in C to find if the given number is even or odd. When other kids were busy playing Pinball and Solitare in the computer lab, I used to write programs that the school teacher taught us. We rarely went to computer labs around once every two weeks. But whenever I got a chance, I tried to write those simple (but hard and interesting enough back then) even/odd and prime number programs.
I got to know about C++ language in class 8th and found the super powerful compiler đ€ and IDE - Turbo C++. Yeah, that blue-screen compiler.
I wrote programs to sum arithmetic and geometric progression, find areas of different shapes count the number of characters in string etc in that compiler. These little programs amazed me a lot. So I convinced my parents to buy a computer for us. Thankfully, my parents understood the importance of computers in the changing world and immediately bought one. It was not a very high-performing machine but it a decent enough. It had an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2GBs of RAM and a 500GB hard disk.
Immediately after I got a computer in my home, I started to explore all the different things in it. I got to know about HTML and CSS. How websites are built in HTML and all. In 2009, the internet was very costly in India. There was no broadband line in my city and mobile Internet was slow. It was the era of 2G networks and 3G was yet to be popular in India.
Till 2010, I had no idea about mobile apps and how they are built. Even I didn’t know that computer programming is a career profession as well. Before that, I used to believe that these programs were written mainly for scientific and computation purposes. There was a show called Tech Guru which was broadcast on every Thursday and Sunday on CNBC Awaaz. It was a show where they shared about the latest mobiles, smartphones and gadgets. In one episode, they talked about how Android is taking over the smartphone world and Nokia is losing the race. And the reason for the change was the app development on Android.
I asked my parents to buy a dongle and a small datapack. I convinced them to do so by saying that it would help me in my studies đŹ Once I got the internet on my PC, I downloaded a couple of books about app development. I went through the books and got to know about editors, SDKs and high-level languages such as JAVA, Python and C#. The Internet was hell slow, the max speed was around 80-100KBps. I downloaded Eclipse IDE and JDK. It took me around 2-3 days to download all that due to poor internet.
I followed step by step what is mentioned in the book on Android development. I didn’t have much data left so I decided to skip downloading AVD images as they were quite big in size. But had no idea that it is required to run and test the app. I still tried to write some code and go through the book. I initially thought that I would learn the language as I learned app development. It didn’t turn out well and I got very confused and didn’t understand things beyond basic programs. I somehow managed to download AVD and also got a book to learn Java. The book was named: Introduction to Java Programming by Y. Daniel Liang. This book helped me a lot in learning Java. I still recommend this book to anyone who is starting Java language. I also used to download the HTML pages of https://developer.android.com so that I can refer to them anytime I need. I didn’t have internet every time available.
In 2012, there was a horror incident that happened in the capital city Delhi of India. A woman was raped and murdered and this incident shocked the entire country. I then decided to make an Android app that would allow users to save 5 emergency contacts and send messages to them in case of any emergencies. I knew it was not a big thing or would change the world order in any way. I just believed in the idea that technology can somehow solve most of the problems that exist in the world. So I started to work on that app. I didn’t have an Android smartphone. So the only way I could test the app was to run it on an emulator. In a month, the basic app was ready and I named it “Help Eye” (not a very exciting name). I didn’t upload the app on the Play Store as I didn’t have a smartphone to test it thoroughly and also didn’t have money to open an account on Google Play.
Once going through the books I downloaded, I found a book named “Programming Windows(R) 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript”. Windows 8 was just launched and so did this book. As the title mentioned, I imagined that we could make Windows 8 apps without any emulator or IDE. Because HTML, CSS or JS can be written in Notepad++ too. I was very stupid. I didn’t even realise that I am developing on Windows 7 so testing would not be possible. After reading a few pages and building a basic page in HTML, I got to know that you require Visual Studio to develop Windows 8 apps.
In 2013, I started to prepare for JEE, which is similar to the SAT but for engineering universities and colleges only. I spent less time coding that year but managed to learn some more Java. Created a game called “ConnectFour” which was a digital version of Four Connect. I found the APK of the game and am super happy to see that it is still working. You can see the screenshot of the game below:
Later on, I went on to join the university in 2014. Our university IIT Roorkee has super fast internet and I got my first Android smartphone. This was the time I could learn software development without any issues. So I went on to join the Mobile Development Group which was a developer community in our university. Since then, I have still coding and hopefully continue to do so in the future. Unless AI abandons the coding.
Coming from the era when Android was yet to become a giant and take over all other platforms, things have changed a lot. The way software is developed now is very different from how they were used to be. Editors were slow. There were very less developer conferences. No AI to help you. Android was mainly about activity and services. Now it is about composition and architecture components. Things were good back then but they are better now. Since then, I have learned so many technologies such as Django, JS/TS, React, and Deep Learning. Still, there is so much left to explore…