I was applying for RubyConf India scholarship which I want to go badly. I missed the last one in Bangalore because I wasn’t in the Ruby scene back then. They did have this question:
Briefly describe your current experience with computers and computer programming
Midway through writing the answer when I figured it was pretty long, unnecessary and would make a nice blogpost after a long break. I don’t think they’d have the time to read this.
The answer:
It was during 11th standard when I was introduced to blogging. Possibly the best thing that happened because I had this stupid need to optimise it.
Blogging ramblings in 2009
Being jobless, I wanted to SEO “optimise” for Blogger (which was free). I was naive back then, I thought meta tags actually worked and wrote:
Meta tag generator
A greasemonkey extension to extend Blogger.com
On hindsight I learnt a lot of stuff, web development with PHP (free hosts!), Javascript, DOM manipulation, XML, RSS. On the whole how the awesome piece of technology called the web worked.
I got a tiny bit of money and could afford a web host (cheapest one at $20/year) and moved to the hot new WordPress platform, wrote a plugin for that too.
Blogger to WordPress Plugin
I still had the blog “optimisation” thing going on and was on my summer break, I wrote
Tweet Random stuff from your RSS feed
which I finally had to shutdown because I couldn’t afford it and was a newbie when it comes to monetization. It used to crash my server on every cron execution.
On hindsight, I learnt full stack web development. I wrote my own shitty user authentication working with sessions, oAuth, Javascript (jQuery).
I played around with TxtWeb API for a while and wrote
Pushmail on SMS (won a contest with that)
I won an iPad when it launched (2010), I wanted to build an app that plays Flash videos. I did struggle a bit to build a hackintosh
I learnt a bit of Objective C when I found out about SkyFire and dropped the project. This would help me a year later. I fell in love with the Mac, I did a lot of freelancing just to buy the cheapest Macbook.
and then my Google account was disabled for no apparent reason. Got pissed and wrote using Ruby and Objective C.
My first commercial project, a nice pocket money for a college kid.
