from if/else humiliation to architecting distributed systems.

first year of college, my c++ professor calls me straight to the front of the classroom. everyone is dead quiet. he tells me to explain basic branching logic, nested if/else.

my brain just froze up completely. i could not say a word. the professor laughed, looked at the entire room, and asked how someone like me even got a seat in computer science.

i went back to my bench quietly, but something snapped in my head. i was not going to sit around playing games in the dorm. i wanted to go make something real and make money on my own terms.

so i started a phone back cover business. i walked directly to local manufacturers, cut out middle distributors, negotiated bulk rates, and started selling them directly to buyers. quickly realized i needed an ecommerce store to display stock instead of doing everything over chats.

i had a friend back then who knew basic html and css. i told him what i was trying to do, and he built a simple mobile responsive interface for the covers. i was blown away by it. but instead of just asking him to keep maintaining it for me, i asked him: how did you actually build this? can you teach me how to code?

he told me to go learn basic html and css first. for two weeks i kept bugging him, asking him questions every single day about how this stuff actually works. i did not have a clear path yet, but the curiosity was eating at me.

then one morning i woke up at 7am, opened youtube half asleep, and randomly saw a 30 minute html crash course on my feed. i clicked it. on an old, slow laptop, i typed my first angle brackets, hit save, and refreshed the browser. seeing my own words render on a page completely broke my brain. code was not some exam question you memorize for marks; it was a tool to build whatever you wanted.

right around that time, watching the social network movie poured gasoline on that fire. seeing mark zuckerberg sit at a desk with headphones on, write code in the middle of the night, deploy it, and immediately watch real people use it online gave me chills. i did not want to write college assignments anymore. i wanted to build living software that people actually touched.

for two years straight, i locked myself in. i was putting in 6 to 14 hours every single day. weekdays, weekends, holidays, did not matter. i would follow complex tutorials, build the app, completely delete the folder, and force myself to rewrite the whole system from scratch without looking just to see where it broke.

by late 2023, i hit a massive wall. i jumped into backend engineering without proper context and drowned. asynchronous queues, distributed state, redis cache invalidation bugs, postgres connection pool limits, and database deadlocks were driving me crazy. i genuinely thought about walking away from backend engineering entirely. i felt stuck.

that was when my college seniors, jahangeer and gowdaman, stepped in.

once that knowledge clicked, i started a secret tutoring initiative. i coached dozens of freshers and seniors who were struggling with their coding rounds and system design interviews. i never told them i was just an undergrad student myself. watching them crack their rounds and text me that they got placed at major tech companies was one of the best feelings of my life.

at the same time, i started posting raw tech breakdowns on instagram as @immucoder. no fancy lighting, no clean studio, just screen recordings and honest engineering breakdowns. the account blew up to 40,000+ developers in six months, which opened doors to direct conversations with senior engineers at google, microsoft, and top tier companies.

feeling confident, i went full indie hacker and shipped two micro saas apps back to back: