Thoughts on Going about in Tech

Yash Deshpande Written on April 12, 2024 3 min read

Preface

I often find myself in a awkward position where I have my peers ask me how I do well in tech, in reality, I’m just an ordinary person with a passion for technology .

Okay that was a bit of a negative start but had to give that preface. And just so we are on same page, by Tech I mean the actual technical intricacies like experimenting with the hot new JS framework that comes out every second, about debugging some arbitrary audio driver that is not working for hours and learning a lot in the process.

Im currently in my 1st year and its safe to say im little above average than most people in my college. I’m not saying this to brag but to give context. That is because my college has such low barrier to entry that you don’t need to have amazing grades to get in, you need to have money to get in. So, most of the people in my college are just doing it for the sake of it.

I’ll just say that most of my peers that ask me “How are you so good at xyz technology” should be having passion for tech or invest the considerable amount of effort into it. If you don’t code in your past time, making dumb or revolutionary projects, you are not passionate about tech. I personally learn by making projects and dumb mistakes during those projects, going into rabbit-holes, reading GitHub issues to solve a particular problem. Instead of taking up the initiative to solve a particular problem, they just ask someone else to solve it for them. I’m not saying that you should not ask for help, but you should atleast try to solve it yourself before, rack your brains for hours then you can ask. Googling the right keywords can get you the answer or a hint on how you can solve that issue. I did not have anyone to ask for help yet I somehow managed to solve the issues and get better. Having guidance is valuable, but there’s a difference between receiving assistance and relying solely on handholding to navigate challenges.

Story Time !

So this is when I was in 11th grade, and I was getting into Web Development and was learning HTML-CSS. I then got this opportunity to be in the technical department of my college’s fest. Despite having zero knowledge of JavaScript, I was asked by the seniors to make a ‘About Me’ page in Next.js and Tailwind CSS, before that a Figma prototype, all within 3 weeks, an entirely overkill tech stack in hindsight. I somehow managed to make a page with animations and everything. It wasn’t the best but it was something, I pulled something of in this short timespan without asking my seniors for help.

p.s. No hard feelings to anyone, just my thoughts on the matter. :)