Hey Victoria (and every gorgeous soul reading this),
I read the edition where you shared about your Journey towards Tech. I had no idea that you know this much game dev. 🤯
Now I think of you as 10x cooler than I used to think about you till reading this edition. Your fascination with Games leading to Development reminded me of a fellow dev that I admire a lot. So I thought I will share this Awesome Developer's Diary in this edition.
Saurabh is a Frontend Engineer at Razorpay and building one of the most interesting side projects out there called Abell. He also shares his knowledge around Web tooling by giving talks and writing blogs. Along with being an amazing developer, Saurabh is one of the most humble people you will across in the face of this planet. I came across Saurabh far back by seeing his Side project Text-to-handwriting, but we connected on 1-1 the first time when we both were invited to last year's React Day panel as we both were helping each other to be less nervous. 😂
During that panel and in some conversations after that, Saurabh shared a lot of fascinating details about his journey towards tech.
"The 13-year-old me loved playing games on the computer. I used to play games like Spider-Man 2000, GTA San Andreas, and several other games. I also loved to install mods and make some changes in the textures of the internal game files to see them change in the game. Overall, I liked the time I spent on computers, so I knew I was going to do something related to it.
After the Grade 12, I enrolled myself in a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering. In Grade 11 we had subjects related to VB.net, HTML, CSS which I liked though I didn’t know much about coding up until the second semester of engineering. In the second semester, we had a genuinely good professor, Dakshata Ma’am. She taught us C and the basics of programming, and I loved that subject! I could always go and ask her doubts whenever I was stuck, and she helped me out with solutions.
Then I started exploring things on my own. I loved how changing the values resulted in different outputs. And of course, running things on the terminal made me feel like a smart person, hehe. By the end of the fourth semester, I knew HTML, CSS, basic PHP and I had done an internship where I taught myself Node and Angular (Yup I learned Node.js and Angular before Client JavaScript 😂).
The reason I got into this field is that - “I loved how changing the values resulted in different output”. So building projects has always been the default I guess? The output changed from small logical outputs in the terminal to websites and web libraries. It ended up becoming a part of the learning process where now I am like- 'Oh! Oh! Let's build XYZ' –> 'Woah, I have no clue how to build XYZ' –> Intense google searching to figure out everything that comes along the way of building XYZ."
But It's much more fun learning together, sharing feedback and cheering n hypingggg each other on!
This would be the ONE core lesson I learned for Saurabh. And I resonate with this soooo much. No matter how shy you are, there is a place for you in the community. As we have been aiming to make this newsletter a place for you to discover people, project and places you can learn from. I thought it would be great to share more about Abell with you. Here's the latest video of Saurabh sharing about Abell.
When I first came across, a lot of indie development projects done by him, I wondered how he manages to be consistent with such audience loved projects while managing his full time job 🤔
"I think of the work-life balance at work and a way to disconnect from work is important. I generally shut down my work notifications after work hours. But even after that, I think it was still hard for me. I didn’t write many side-projects in the last 1 year. Majorly because I am satisfied with my job and most of the learning now happens at work, so I don’t really need side-projects any more to learn things. Also, the pandemic has been disturbing, and I had hit some dead-ends in projects and was out of ideas.
But I think 1 year-long break, a vacation, lots of K-drama, and some ideas about the side-project helped me get back to it. I’ve been working on my side-project Abell now for the last few weeks. Oh! Also, shoutout to people at Razorpay for being super supportive. My team-lead sponsors me on GitHub, we talk about side-projects in our mentorship meetings or chill sessions, and just in general having a lot of smart people around is super helpful." — says Saurabh.
I personally see myself resonating with this. Like there are days when I move mountains by handling tens of side projects and my job and then there are days when I don't even feel like writing a single line of code outside work. But, I guess it is what it is. So it is completely valid to take a break from all the side hustles when you feel you need it. Specially in times like these when a lot of us are not having enough hope. I pray we get to see a more hopeful tomorrow. 🙏🏻
You can check out more of Saurabh's work on his Twitter and GitHub. And if you wish to ask him, me or Victoria any questions, feel free to reply to this email. We are loving the emails you people have been sending us! 😊
Thank you reading so far!
Victoria, I will see you on Tuesday.