Story
In the world of software development, where change is the only constant, it is easy to get lost in the crowd. I felt the same when I came to the United States. I came to the US with an easy-going mindset as I never really had to worry about things like finding a job or being the best. Since in India, I was always under the illusion of going abroad for my further studies, I thought why does it matter to excel at coding or do interviews since at the end of the day, I am just going to go abroad.
I realized the weight of feigning ignorance and sitting idle when I came here. I saw students with internships in MNCs, doing LeetCode left and right and having stellar resumes and grades. Compared to me - a student with a 7.44 GPA (out of 10) and an undergrad in Electronics and Communications, someone who taught himself C++ through YouTube and wanted to be an ML engineer as it was all the hype then - I seemed like nothing but an ant.
Soon for better or worse, reality set in that all the laziness and feigning ignorance had come back as a boomerang to hit me on the head. With that realization, I knew I had to put in double the efforts to be better. I had to not only learn more in the fields of Software Engineering and Machine Learning but also had to sell myself better. That meant not only having the skills to code up a portfolio but also having the skills to make it useful and worth remembering.
Back then, given the shallow knowledge I had about React, NextJS, or TypeScript, I had to try to find an easy way to get myself out there. The best simple way to get a portfolio at that time was GitHub Pages. While it is a relic of the past, this is how it looks like. At the moment, given my skillset, this seemed the best way for me to keep myself out there, and I attached it to my LinkedIn, hoping people would stumble upon it.
Learnings
A year has passed since then, and not a single person has ever asked me about my portfolio. Things changed a lot and I am thankful to God - in his own amazing ways, I had an on-campus position that allowed me to transition to many fields and learn a lot. I was fortunate to have 2 internship experiences as well. It was until last week (last week of March 2024) that I finally took a shot in the dark and sent a mail to one of the engineers I look up to, Linus Lee. Given his kind heart, he responded back (a dream come true, to say the least). I got a chance to talk to an engineer I looked up to for an hour, and it was amazing.
In all the things we talked about, one thing that came up was how I found Linus. I was randomly reading some blog when I stumbled upon Linus's blog, and that's how I found him and started to look up to him. Of all things, I looked up to Linus because he had a lot of amazing projects and he always wrote something about them. Not only having a high finish rate but also some written story about it made me realize that this was one of the reasons I looked up to him, and also how it was his way of getting himself out there and getting a chance to talk with people.
I have a lot to talk about from that meeting, and I thank Linus from the bottom of my heart for talking with me. Meeting with him made me realize small things matter, and documenting and putting it out there about things you find interesting and are working on can help you find like-minded people and would open a lot of doors. While I am not expecting that my first post in itself will get me somewhere, I am optimistic (Linus mentioned his first 100 posts went majorly unnoticed and now look at where he is).
Keeping that in mind, I will thread on.