What made me want to be a developer?

Hi. I was completely new to the programming world an year back, so new that to even understand a for loop was a challenge for me. My 4 years of college education was focused mostly on circuits, control systems with little exposure to coding and I was preparing seriously for getting into my masters after my bachelors. My day started and ended by writing down everything on a paper with a pen. Seeing a computer screen gave me a headache at that time but future had other plans for me.

I studied for a bare minimum of 7 days to get a low paying job during college placements which was a normal thing for my college. I was focusing more on my masters exam which was going to happen in my 7th semester so my brain got wired to think like a problem solver but only on notebook. No codes were part of my life at that time and I was happy. Then pandemic happened.

During the pandemic I got into a very bad phase mentally, I was not able to focus but was trying hard to score a good rank. I ended up getting 2705 AIR that year but my hopes were shattered. I was not able to think beyond my exams after getting my results and during this time I was also doing my job which took 8 hours of my day. During my placements in college, to get the job aptitude was required but once I got into the company, I was being taught JAVA, algorithms and full stack. I needed this job since my masters required 1 more year of strict dedication which I was not sure to commit at that time due to poor mental health so I began taking help from my colleagues to understand a basic for loop and how to calculate how many times a loop will run and this went on for many days. My training went on for 6 months, during this time I was not studying circuits or anything related to my exam but only coding 6-7 hours every day. When you calculate the number of hours I had to give to stay in my job, you will realize any person will begin to understand programming language at beginner level after spending that much time.

During this time, I came across a YouTube channel. It was of Kunal Kushwaha and it opened the world of tech twitter for me. In college I saw only 3-4 friends of mine who were coding and they did not do anything significant until placements began so I had no reference to see the world of programming and what possibilities it can bring in the life of a person. While following the open source world of GitHub I came across the people who were building products which intrigued me a lot. I saw founders on twitter, people posting on twitter and the world out there which were having programmers building stuffs which required brains and enjoying their free time.

I had to take a call by then because my masters exam was coming again in 4 months and I had a job which required me to code. The paths were widely opposite. I had to choose a new field to explore or a field which I had already given 3 years of my time during preparation. I calculated the possibilities I had in the new field and took a call. Now it's an year of programming for me, I have made projects after learning from tutorials, have solved 150+ problems on leet code.

That's my journey of how I got into programming. If you have read this far, thankyou so much for your attention.