A timeline of my learning, projects, and milestones.
June 2023 se abhi tak — ek engineering student ki kahani.
June 2023. First day of college. I had no such clarity. I walked in with curiosity and a vague sense that technology was interesting.
College started the way it usually does for most of us — with a video editing course. I learned Premiere Pro, touched Blender, made some edits for college events and clubs. It was fine. But it was not mine.
Then, in September 2023, I walked into a session of my college's Robotics Club. Something clicked.
I dropped the video editing. Just like that.
My brother and I had a long argument around this time. He thought I should pick a lane — either go all in on software or commit to robotics. Reasonable advice, honestly.
I disagreed.
I decided to join the Robotics Club and learn full-stack development on the side. Pagalpan lagta tha, but it made sense to me. Robotics gave me hardware, embedded systems, real physical things. Software gave me the ability to build anything on a screen. I wanted both.
So that became the plan — Robotics Club by day, coding tutorials by night.
My software learning started the way it starts for most students in India — with Love Babbar's HTML and CSS videos on YouTube. No bootcamp fees, no structured course, just late nights and a browser tab open next to my textbook.
At the same time, the Robotics Club introduced me to embedded programming, hardware components, and bot-building sessions. I participated in Smart India Hackathon's hardware section that year. Lost, but learned. The club became my real classroom for the first semester.
Sem 1 exams came, I survived them, and moved on.
Early January 2024. Somehow I got Love Babbar's Dot Batch content from Telegram — JavaScript, React.js, Node.js, Express.js, backend development. I went through it in two months. Made backend projects, understood how APIs work, built things that actually ran.
Then, somehow, I got Kirat Cohort 2 from Telegram.
That's when I realized I knew almost nothing.
Cohort 2 was a different level — DevOps, Linux, Blockchain, advanced system design. I spent two months grinding through it. But when I looked up from the material, I had a problem: no projects. No resume. No portfolio. Sirf knowledge thi, proof nahi tha.
Sem 2 exams arrived. I paused, cleared them, then went straight to the library.
For the next two to three months, I sat there and built. Ups and downs, days where nothing worked, days where everything clicked. At the end of it, I had two real projects:
Notewrite — a full-stack ed-tech application with multiple user roles, built from scratch.
Paytm Clone — from Cohort 2's curriculum, but I made it my own.
It wasn't much, but it was real. Mera tha.
September. Engineers Day. My college's Robotics Club held a project showcase. I put Notewrite on display.
A senior noticed.
He walked over, looked at the project, asked a few questions, and then one day he messaged me asking for my resume and portfolio. He didn't explain why.
My heart stopped.
I didn't have a resume. I didn't have a portfolio. Nothing.
I told him: "Working on the portfolio, will send in 2 days."
Then I sat down and built a portfolio website from scratch in two days. Made a resume. Sent it.
They scheduled an interview. I got half an hour's notice before it started.
I sat down in the room and gave the interview. Only later did I find out — it was an IIT Bombay interview.
I got selected.
The assignment they gave me afterwards? Everyone on the panel was impressed by my folder structure and code quality. Woh moment alag hi tha.
Internship at IIT Bombay ran alongside my third semester. That period was dense.
I led my college's team in Smart India Hackathon on the software side — handled the entire technical direction. We built a Constitution Literacy Game, a web-based multiplayer platform designed to teach Indian citizens about the Constitution through interactive gameplay. Ambitious project, real execution.
Around the same time, I built a Hospital Management System — OPD queue management, bed tracking, patient admissions, inventory. Designed to scale to city-level deployments.
I also learned Web3 properly through Kirat Cohort, built blockchain-based prototypes, understood how decentralized systems actually work beneath all the hype.
The Robotics Club got a proper website and onboarding documentation that semester — juniors finally had something to read when they joined.
LinkedIn ka ek random DM. A remote offer for a Backend and DevOps Intern role at Crew.
I joined.
Working remotely with an experienced DevOps team was different from everything before. Real infrastructure, production systems, actual stakes. I learned Kubernetes, Docker, Azure, GCP — not from tutorials but from doing. Designed production-level architectures end to end.
Semester 4 was academically light, which helped. I put most of my focus into the internship.
That semester, the Robotics Club organized a Robowars competition. We built a combat robot from scratch. The work, the late nights in the lab, the hardware failures that we fixed at midnight — and then we placed third.
Third. Not first. But we built something that fought.
As part of academics, I built two projects that I genuinely enjoyed:
Music Reactive Flasher — lights that respond to sound frequencies. Simple concept, satisfying to see it work.
Real-time Location Tracking System — a React Native mobile app that tracked location using an ESP32 microcontroller and a NEO-6M GPS module over BLE. Geofencing with a 200-meter radius, time tracking for inside/outside zones. The kind of project that teaches you how embedded systems and software actually talk to each other.
Second year ended here.
I became Programming Head of the Robotics Club. The role shifted something in how I thought about learning — now I was responsible for the people coming after me.
I taught juniors how to build software, guided them through hackathons, reviewed their code. Teaching is a different kind of learning. Jab kisi ko explain karo, tabhi pata chalta hai ki actually samjha hai ya nahi.
The hardware side pushed further that year. We built a Kamikaze autonomous drone — programmed for autonomous flight and targeting. Mini drones too. I was deep in robotics in a way I hadn't been before.
We participated in Smart India Hackathon 2025 again. Organized Robomania 2026, the club's flagship robotics event. And then, the biggest thing — I led the organizing team for LOOP 1.0, the first-ever 24-hour national-level hackathon organized by our college. Over 100 teams, real judging, real stakes.
I started Robomaniac as my own initiative — a startup focused on robotics and embedded systems. It began small, as these things do. But the direction is clear.
I am building something mine. Again.
Somewhere in all this, I also started taking fitness seriously. Structured diet, protein-rich meals, creatine, whey. The goal is straightforward — get stronger, stay consistent.
Yaar, body nahi banti ek din mein. But neither does a good codebase.
Right now, I am focused on building scalable systems — AI pipelines, production-grade DevOps architectures, real products that reach real users. Learning Golang. Getting better at system design every day.
The plan is simple: keep building, keep learning, keep shipping.
2023 mein kuch pata nahi tha. Abhi pata hai ki kahan jaana hai.
That is enough.
Design & Developed by aspirant op
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