My Journey

I didn't grow up planning to be an engineer.

Back in primary school, I lived in a village where students relied heavily on guidebooks to pass exams — but many couldn't afford them. At the same time, I noticed something: even families who struggled to buy school supplies often had a phone at home.

That gave me an idea.

I wanted to build a free Android app with basic educational content — stories, letters, paragraphs — to help kids like me study. There was just one problem: I didn't know how to code. We had no Wi-Fi. And downloading Android Studio? That was an entire mission.

I used to stash away my lunch money and walk half a mile to the nearest store—just to buy a bit of mobile bandwidth for my phone. It wasn't a one-time mission; I made that trip over and over again. And just as often, I failed. Sometimes the Android Studio installer would crawl to 50%, only to throw a "storage full" error and wipe out all the data—and my hard-earned money. Other times, the downloads would corrupt, or the installer would crash for no reason. I learned to stretch every megabyte, using it to read tutorials, grab tools, and troubleshoot the bugs I didn't yet know how to fix. Just downloading Android Studio took 12 hours—half a day of holding my breath, praying the signal wouldn't drop. Every step was a grind, from getting my first onClickListener right to figuring out why the emulator stubbornly refused to open.

My computer itself was another battle. With only 1GB of RAM, every compilation was a test of patience. I lost count of how many times I had to restart the PC when it froze — probably a billion. Eventually, I managed to upgrade the RAM, only to discover my hard disk was too small to even handle the extra memory effectively. The constant disk thrashing sound became the soundtrack of my coding sessions.

I didn't have access to mentors or YouTube tutorials. When I got stuck, I'd leave it, come back later, and keep going. It was isolating — programming without guidance or feedback. There were days when I wondered if it was worth the effort, especially when running into the same errors over and over.

Sometimes, I'd even skip school. Not because I didn't value education, but because some days, solving a coding problem seemed more important than sitting through classes that felt distant from what I was trying to build.

It was an odd feeling — building something to help others while feeling somewhat disconnected myself.

After months of trial-and-error, sleepless nights, and a progress bar that seemed frozen in time, I finally held a working APK in my hands. I couldn't afford the $25 Play Store fee at first, but later I managed — and in 2018, I published it to the Play Store. It only had a few users, and it's been deleted since, but it was real, and it worked.

That's where it all began.

Not with a goal of becoming a software engineer — but with a desire to solve a problem I saw around me.

I know it's probably not a big deal today, and maybe not even much of an achievement in the grand scheme of things. But I share this not to brag — just to give context. That's how it started. And I'm still learning, still building.