how i learned to code

small learnings that taught me to code from start (top) to end (bottom)

• • built a hangman game in java
• • learned the basics of c++ from my computer science teacher in high school
• • joined my school's programming club and learned from better programmers
• • tried out competitive programming and did the ccc twice in c++
• • joined a group of other students and learned a lot building voluntrack
• • built my first gpt wrapper during an online hackathon with friends
• • made a student registration and mobile calculator app using kotlin
• • landed first software engineering internship at RBC in summer 2024
• • tried to make an interactive valentine's day website
• • built an ML model on jupyter notebook using python, numpy and pandas
• • learned a lot of what i needed from geeks for geeks and w3schools
• • built some random projects with javascript, html and css for the first time
• • built another gpt wrapper at jamhacks
• • built a study buddy tool with friends at hack the valley
• • built a music boombox thing at uoft hacks
• • built the first version of my personal website
• • went to the university of waterloo for systems design engineering
• • learned intro to programming in c++ and built projects for school
• • built my resume in latex on overleaf
• • started to solve leetcode problems on a more regular basis
• • joined engineering design teams to learn how to code in organizations
• • joined ownr as a software engineer intern for the winter
• • learned about unit and integration tests
• • learned a lot of git commands including git cherry-pick
• • built a dependabot clone with a friend during my free time
• • built a trash sorter at hack the 6ix with rbc friends
• • worked in a production codebase developing internal tools for the team
• • learned typescript, next.js, vite and react and used postman a lot
• • messed around with postgres, sql and the debugger for the first time
• • got more familiar with the terminal and ai and used stack overflow still
• • won 2nd place by building a posture checking robot at utra hacks
• • took data structures and algorithms in c++ during second semester of uni
• • hopped on twitter where i learned a lot and met other cool cs students
• • started to take leetcode more serious and watched a ton of neetcode on yt
• • made an etl pipeline that processed customer feedback
• • built a discord summarizer bot using python for fun at 2am
• • used golang for the first time and built an image processor
• • made this facial recognition software for fun in python and typescript
• • tried learning haskell for the first time
• • built sql query parser with typescript and svelte for parsing flat json
• • created diff digest tool for fetching github pr diffs for ai summarization
• • landed a software engineering internship at textql for the fall
• • had to learn matlab for one of my uni courses during school
• • built a url shortener using golang and tailwind css hosted on railway
• • made a mini worse version of figma
• • did many takehomes and coding assignments
• • redesigned my entire personal website twice
• • coworker told me to start using iterm2 and i fell in love
• • used a lot of claude code, codex and cursor when programming
• • worked on the textql healthcare landing page landing page
• • learned how to use the terminal better than before
• • worked at a startup and used a lot of go, python, typescript and svelte
• • worked on the ontology a lot at textql
• • did a lot of agentic and applied ai work
• • learned even more git commands including git bisect
• • broke prod at textql 4 times and learned how to debug and fix it
• • learned rust for the first time and built some random things
• • participated in a mercor ML model challenge with friend
• • did some benchmarking with web search apis for the first time
• • made a link route checker script
• • started learning some system design for programming

note: i am updating this everyday