How to Get a Job Like Mine?

I recently read Aaron Swartz’s blog post, ‘How to Get a Job Like Mine (opens in a new tab)’, and I thought about how I got to my job, where I work on projects with like-minded people. What were the key events on getting here that many people of my age dream of and wouldn’t have to go through the odd companies.

It all started with me being born with good parents who believed in me.

Being born in a typical Indian family, I didn’t have access to technology, specifically computers, from an early age. But many may beg to differ, as the first computer in my family was when I was 10 yr old. But I didn’t had that much curiosity back then like today’s teens have on tech. I was just used to game GTA titles on that machine. I finally got a personal laptop in 11th grade. It was a pretty cheap machine on which I started ($300). But as before, I started with a lot of gaming on that machine till I saw one of my classmates making games with the Unity engine. This also got me interested in game development. I tried to make games on it, but it was never finished until we discovered hackathons.

Through this, I started learning and trying out different CS fields, from cyber sec to game dev. And finally, sticking to the one I like. During this time, I also discovered online communities on Twitter and Discord. It was a place where I could talk to people about tech and make friends (most of them were college students), but I gained many insights from them. During this time, I started to build basic websites and progressively got better. Then college hit, and the building phase got a bit slowed down, and I started learning the Data structures and lang like Java.

As the year went by, I got the urge to start building again. This came with a call with Micheal. We decided to build a company. This was a great experience as this was the first time I was talking with people with real experience founding companies and engineers. This also leads me to meet many people on Discord and Twitter. This led me to try out and build many things, one of which was Tangerine - A KV store written in Java that impressed my people and got me job offers.

I wouldn’t consider this a big achievement, but we are just getting started. Also, I did a lot of indie hacking during that time. There were a lot of nights sacrificed and not sitting in the college entrance exams. There is lot more to this story, but its getting really long.

If I could summarize my experience into points

• Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
• Talk to people.
• Build stuff.
• Again, talk with people.

If you ever want to know my journey in more detail or wanna have a chat dm me on twitter at @theanuragdev (opens in a new tab)