Overview of My Journey in Tech Till Now

Hi !
I’ve been wanting to document my journey in tech and since it keeps updating each year, I am thinking about writing a blog every year to reflect upon my growth. This is my first blog on this topic.

My journey began after I enrolled in a graduate program (2021 - 2025), and I’ll be graduating this year in August. Looking back, I realized that it was my college seniors who influenced me to make some crucial decisions that helped shape my journey to be drastically different from the conventional paths. They informed me about how the tech industry works for freshers and how we have to follow a bureaucratic system where we get to practice real-world engineering only in the 8th semester or after graduation unless we do something different. The whole idea of solving LeetCode questions and eventually getting to practice real-world engineering only in the final year onwards was very demotivating, and I decided to do something about it. Didn't know the path during that point in time.

Initially, in 2021, I started watching Python tutorials on YouTube and soon felt like an OG who could build any scraper or calculator. :p

As 2022 began, I discovered freelancing, open-source, competitive programming, and other exciting things people were doing. However, I had academics pressure to focus on rather than tech, so I only learned Java until April 2022. I tried building projects but eventually felt that no one would use my Java projects. This led me to search for ways to practice programming.

During the summer vacation in May 2022, I came across open-source and decided to give it a shot! I wandered around GitHub, found many projects, and ultimately chose Java as my tech stack for contributions since I had recently learned it and found it easier to recall. I came across a project called Debezium, but at the time, I was too naive to understand what it did. I went through its documentation, got the Java codebase running on my PC, and it felt like magic. Back then, I was more interested in understanding the implementations rather than the bigger picture (which, in hindsight, was my biggest mistake). I simply started looking for beginner-friendly issues. Eventually, I found one that seemed easy to tackle and began working on it. It took me roughly 15 days to perfect the PR after several rounds of reviews from maintainers. When it finally got merged, I felt like a champion—I was super proud!

The rest of the year passed without any substantial achievements, just exploring new areas like web development and data science.

At the start of 2023, I decided to restart my open-source journey. Java was once again my choice, and I made some naive contributions to various projects. Eventually, I got involved in a project where I was also selected for the Google Summer of Code 2023 program. The project was Apache ShardingSphere, and it seemed doable, so I started contributing. I found GSoC-related ideas in open issues within the repository, and they seemed withing my scope. The thought of gaining industry experience while still in college and working in a large, well-organized codebase felt like a dream!

Skipping ahead, I worked on it until September 2023, after which I became very busy with academics again. While exploring new domains, I came across DevOps and CNCF. To learn Golang better, I built some projects and studied the codebases of various CNCF projects such as Kyverno, Jaeger, Prometheus, and PromQL. However, I faced challenges contributing because I was using Windows. That was when I shifted to Ubuntu, and my productivity skyrocketed.

As 2024 began, I discovered the LFX Mentorship Program. Skipping the details of the application process, I got selected to work on the CNCF Antrea project. This became my first major contribution to a CNCF project and helped me acquire crucial DevOps skills that I hadn't been aware of—Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, industry-level Golang implementations, and much more. That mentorship ended in May and helped me build a strong foundation in the field.

While figuring out career paths related to DevOps, I got the opportunity to work remotely as an SRE. Since then, I’ve been working at my current organization. By the end of 2024, I had practiced all aspects of DevOps, including monitoring, deployment, CI/CD, server handling, cluster management, and Golang projects.

Looking back, my journey changed many times in my quest to find a domain that truly interested me—from Python to Java, Java to compiler design, and then from compiler design to DevOps and community involvement.

At the time of writing this, I am continuing my role as an SRE and have started contributing to open-source again in my free time. Let’s see how 2025 unfolds!

Thanks for reading :)