My Journey

2020 January, 1 month before Covid, I was fired from my student mechanical engineering job at AVL. After firing, I felt really down. I knew I could do better, but something told me that mechanical engineering was not for me.

But what is for me? What am I passionate about? What do I want to do with my life? Some very important questions that I did not know the answers to. Yet.

Then COVID happened, all students had to work and study from home, limited movement outside the house, so I stayed at my parents' home, with my 4 brothers. It was chaos. What to do when you are stuck at home with nowhere to go? Doom scrolling was the answer.

After doom scrolling on Twitter, I found out about a guy named levelsio, now a well-known Twitter indie hacker. I was inspired by how one man could build 3 successful startups and make $100k/m (now $250k/m). But what did he do? This YouTube video explains it all here.

I was so inspired that I bought a Udemy course for HTML/CSS and JavaScript. I spent the next 3 months learning and building personal projects. I woke up at 6 am, started working/learning at 7 am, and drew pomodoros for every 25 minutes that I did. At the end of it all, I had 3 full pages of pomodoros.

So after knowing the basics of programming, what to do next? I learned that there are frontend and backend, so the next thing was to learn backend. I made some little projects with Node.js and MongoDB, a basic fullstack database.

Now I was confident about building my own projects. But what to build? How to come up with ideas? I had multiple big ideas (Instagram for dogs, Uber only for the elderly), but how to compete with somebody that had over 1 billion revenue and 1000 engineers hired? There is no way, so I decided to follow @levelsio's advice to build multiple projects and small projects and see what sticks.

My first project was Cost friendly flights. Look at the designs 😅. Ah, it was awful, but I learned a lot about building and shipping a project.

Then after a failed attempt, I was very discouraged from shipping again. So I decided to find myself a programming job.

First programming job, unsuccesfull side projects and getting a new job in the next chapter...