A brief intro

Hey hi, readers! I am Arnab Chatterjee. I am an eighteen-year-old kid and recently I passed my 1st year of my college. One week ago my second year of college started.

I am a full-stack web developer having proficiency in python full stack and MERN. I am also having hands-on experience with AWS , docker and react native. I also love to build automation scripts using google app script and github actions. I love to write articles and blogs about the topic which are bit confusing. I am also interested in ui and ux.

I also love to contribute to open-source projects. I am a newbie in this field and made some newbie to intermediate range contributions.

My Journey of 2023 till Now

The latter of 2022

Without telling a brief of my journey before college, it will be hard to explain how 2023 played some major role in my career.

My college started during the last week of November 2023. But before entering my college I was deeply interested in coding and also did low-price freelancing during my class 12th and also got familiar to full stack web development during the latter half of my class 12.

After completing my exams, some people contacted to build their startup platform from scratch as a freelancer and be their tech consultant. So I was already working on a big project before entering my college.

When I entered college I was already motivated to complete the platform properly as the founders were not worried about the time rather they were worried about the proper functioning.

I got some helpful and inspiring seniors. They made me introduce to open source , community building , LinkedIn and online profile building.

The beginning of 2023

My first hackathon and my first victory

• Our college organized an inter-college hackathon during January.

• Some of the great folks and seniors participated.

• I was bit nervous cause some really tough guys were participating. But I was confident. I pitched for the first time and I won the first position. My first victory 🏆

• My Project Idea - AI and chat-gpt 3 was really on hype at that moment. And I was really frustrated with my pending reprots. So I built a student workspace integrating real time collaboration , rich text editing , image downloader, image finder , ai chat bot and publishing feature.

• The interesting thing that I did was I introduced caching using mongodb and expiration of cache after one week to reduce latency. I did all of these in 1week.

Tried IoT in a hackathon

• The craze of IoT and hardware programming is huge in our college. Every year our college conducts a hardware modelling competition. I was having no idea of hardwares, IoT and embedded programming. But I was having an idea. So I participated.

• Around 130 teams and 650 students participated. And I won the jury's choice award 🏆. Visiters were loving our project. Everyone was coming and they felt it exciting. I was having high fever but still, I presented with lots of energy.

• I worked with node mcu and embedded c for the first time.

• Project Idea - Worked with communication problems during event management.

Secured top 15 in WOC 3.0(nationals)

• I listened from seniors about a national open source contribution competition like hacktober-fest by IIIT kalyani and it consists of both simple and complex projects.

• I written the abstract for Ved Vyas Foundation(creator of writesonic) for their project Bhagvad Gita.

• Build the realtime text streaming system, rate limiting system, fixed some bugs and also redesigned and implemented some uis. I worked on both of public and private projects.

• As I was having semester exams, I was able to contribute for 1 month. But yes it was sufficient.

• The tech stack(Next js + flask) and open source was new to me so it was some good learning experience from the mentor and fellow developers.

• Fun fact, the project I worked on was also published in the newspaper.

• I participated in my first national competition with more than 2300+ participants and was able to secure under the top 15 🏆. I also received my first swags.

Deployed a whole startup platform on AWS

• In the startup I mentioned where I am working as a developer and consultant, I deployed it for testing.

• I build the whole platform from scratch.

• While deploying I learned a bunch of things like docker, many AWS services, a bit of system design and encapsulation & abstraction principles. And all of these things I learned in a proper way that I was able to use in my internship as well.

• As the client requirement was for AWS so I did. I told them not to deploy on AWS. Later they came and told me to redeploy it on some other platform. But I am a bit due to hackathons from last month and as the backend is using a lot of AWS services so gonna do it in next month.

Cracked my first internship as a backend developer

Actually, it is a funny and memorable story.

• I received and cracked a lot of internships but I did not join them due to some issues like low stipend and work flexibility and also sometimes not proper work culture.

• But I got one startup based in Bangalore named "DubDub.ai" and I truly liked it cause it was suitable for me. And their whole infrastructure was based on microservices. So I could learn a lot.

• After submitting their home assignment, I got selected for the next round. On the morning of the interview I was informed it would be based on DSA. And I just started it. At that time I just completed arrays and just started recursion.

• I tried to act confident. The question they asked was totally out of bounds for me. But here's the twist. They told me to share my screen and show them my best backend project. They wanted to see my practices. I showed them my startup project. They got impressed as it was quite complex. They asked a lot of question based on docker and migrations.

• I was told that they liked my development profile. But if I got selected for the next round be ready for DSA. And I got the mail for next round. But we all know in 1 week it is impossible to complete the whole dsa. But I started taking it seriously.

• In my next round with the CEO, my general development skills , my problem solving skills and also the rest api design skills were tested. He literally asked me to build a rest api design for one their already implemented video feature. And I did it.

• I got selected on that day only. I cracked my first internship just after completing my 1st sem without DSA.

Understood my leadership and presentation skills

• I build my team for an intra college hackathon sponsored by the government of India.

• Our topic was on women's safety. We designed a mobile app named "Awaz".

• Our presentation was the best in the room and it was quite creative. But got rejected as we have not shown them the app rather we shown them our plans and implementation ideas.

• Due to some miscommunication, we thought we need to show the app in next round.

• But I understood my leadership capabilities.

Build my community in college and representing it in state level

• My college lacks the coding and tech culture. Everyone wants to follow only the college curriculum and only wants to get good CGPAs

• So I thought of building an official society inside the college for spreading awarness about modern tech and open source. When I went to my HOD and principal, no one signed our application.

• We opened it unofficially. Represented it in a business competition and shared our ideas about how it gonna act as a platform for learners and how they will be benefitted. We opened it in open-source mode. We won the competition beating some of the well-established startup founders.

• Next week we are going to represent it at the state level.

Build my online brand in linkedin

• At first it was quite hard for me to get my self adjust with linked in and learning in public. But I did it.

• I am that much confident with my profile that I can cold dm or email anyone to get an internship and most of the time it got selected. Even I asked for Microsoft internship referral and I got it but as I just completed my 1st , they told me that I could get the referral but I am eligible to sit for the internship. Now I don't know how much truth was that but it was quite satisfactory.

Achievements except from tech

• Completed my first year without any backlog and without 75% attendance with an average of 7.5 in both the sems.

• My DSA and problem-solving skills increasing day by day.

• My pressure-handling capabilities increased a lot. It happened after I suffered from mental health problems due to a lot of pressure for 1 month. But I am now at a different level. Every problem seems like "Ok no issue! I will solve it".

• I also started writing blogs and I enjoy it a lot.

Skills

I learned a lot of things practically while working on projects. Some of them are -

• Docker

• AWS

• React Native

• Fast API

• Zustand

• Type Script

Conclusion

So 2023 is going very well for me. Participating in hackathons, building connections, learning new things , applying them and enjoying my life is what all I am doing.

I like web development the most so I am making a deep dive into it. Hope you like my blog and get inspired a bit as well. I know I need to work on a lot of things and I also feel depressed sometimes as well but rejections are also a part of life. Currently I am focussing more on upskilling myself.

So bye for now!