In 2004, I was playing Need for Speed: Underground 2 on a CRT monitor. Somewhere between playing the game and wondering how it worked, I became interested in the people who made it. I wanted to understand how you could build something like that.
That question was my way into programming. I didn’t have a career plan. There was a game I liked, a computer in front of me, and a lot I didn’t understand.
Following the questions
I taught myself through forums, IRC, and other people’s source code. Those were the places I went when I wanted to figure something out.
Reading code gave me something concrete to work with. I could look at a program someone had written and try to follow the decisions inside it. Even when I couldn’t understand all of it, I had a place to start. A question about one piece would lead me to the next.
Looking back, I think that mattered more than having a tidy sequence of things to learn. My curiosity already had somewhere to go. Games made me want to know how software worked, and the code I found gave me more questions to ask.
There’s a lot of advice now about the right way to get into programming. My own route was fairly untidy. Forums and IRC were part of my education, alongside time spent reading code that was beyond what I could write myself.
Then it became my job
In 2014, straight out of school, I joined Nextwave Multimedia in Chennai. I became the server team for World Cricket Championship, responsible for its multiplayer and transaction backends.
I find that connection funny in hindsight. A game had got me interested in programming, and my first job was working on the software behind one. By then, the questions included how to keep a backend running for people who were already using it.
That responsibility became a large part of what I enjoyed about engineering. Over the following years, I worked on marketplaces and supply-chain software, and co-founded a few companies. The domains changed, and there was always another part of the business I needed to understand before I could write useful software for it.