the origin story
here comes the lore drop
chapter 0: the beginnings
so the whole thing kicked off back in 2017 when i got super obsessed with pokemon. i was playing it on my gba console but i wanted to play the newer games which led me to start emulating the newer pokemon games and then some fan-made versions of those games with even better stories on my crusty old laptop. i immediately wanted to make my own game with my own world, stories and characters. that rabbit hole led me to this community called pokecommunity.
now, pokecommunity was basically a discussion forum where people showcased their art, fan made games, and just talked about pokemon in general. but the insane bit was they had their own battle server which basically is a self-hosted fork of pokemon showdown, a very popular pokemon battle simulator where you can play & chat with your friends. i was hooked instantly, it was like a new home. some of the people there were cracked programmers, who basically maintained the server, built their own bot and added custom features… i was just a random kid in awe, trying to keep up.
eventually i started messing with rom hacks myself. flipping hex values, shoving custom maps into random memory slots, all that janky stuff which, to be honest, i didn’t understand most of, i was blackboxing concepts left and right, but it was addictive to see it all somehow work. on top of that, i picked up bits of html/css knowledge just to flex, making my very own forum signatures, chatroom banner for my own little chat room on the server lmao. i was having a lot of fun.
chapter 1: high school era
after my 10th boards i had to move cities, and during 11th/12th i got introduced to python thanks to the cbse curriculum. then covid hit, and suddenly i had way too much free time.
naturally i went feral. i and my friend whom i met on the forum had this glorious idea of building a blog site where we would teach programming basics and monetize it with google ads and become multi-millionaires over the days. i went all in, learnt django from corey schafer’s amazing playlist and built this (super bloated) blog site. i kept piling on features that made wordpress (the free version) look like a toy site in comparison (sarcasm alert) but each page started taking about 30 seconds to load. i thought i was on fire, but after months i had a weird realisation: what i built was no where near the other sites on the web, they were much faster, sleeker and had a way better user experience.
chapter 2: web dev grind
that pushed me into the “make it better” phase. i wanted my site to feel fast, modern, actually usable. that’s when i stumbled onto react. i learnt no one was actually using django for anything serious, most seemed to be using react. i decided to start with something small and built myself a portfolio site. funnily i didnt actually knew javascript, so it was sheer trial and error + lots of googling and stack overflow.
then i derailed into react native for a bit, built random apps, circled back to react, and just kept shipping small projects. college came around, i explored web3, dipped my toes into game dev too, but eventually i always came back to the same lane: building full stack apps.
chapter 3: today
fast forward to now (the post college era), i’m working as a data engineer. right now my focus is to learn how to build systems at scale and not just rely on duct tape and prayers. im also very intrigued by generative ai and their possible applications.