🚀 How It All Started

You know how in some places, students need those expensive guidebooks to pass exams? Back in elementary school, most families in my village couldn't afford them. But here's the thing — almost everyone had a phone.

So I started tinkering. Without Wi-Fi, learning anything meant downloading stuff on mobile data — tutorials, tools, whatever I could find. I played around with After Effects, tried Photoshop, explored different software. Just experimenting, really.

While messing around with all this, an idea popped up: what if I built a simple Android app with free educational content? Stories, letters, paragraphs — basic stuff to help students study. Problem was, I had no clue how to code. And downloading Android Studio with no Wi-Fi? That was a whole mission on its own.

You know how hard it is to download something when you don't have Wi-Fi? Try walking half a mile to buy mobile data with whatever money you saved, then watching your download hit 50% before crashing with a "storage full" error. All that money and time — gone. This happened over and over. Downloads would corrupt, installers would fail, signals would drop. Every megabyte mattered. Just getting Android Studio took 12 hours of praying nothing would break. Then came figuring out what an onClickListener even was, or why the emulator refused to start.

My computer itself was another battle. With only 1GB of RAM, every compilation was a test of patience. I lost count of how many times I had to restart the PC when it froze — probably a billion. Eventually, I managed to upgrade the RAM, only to discover my hard disk was too small to even handle the extra memory effectively. The constant disk thrashing sound became the soundtrack of my coding sessions.

I didn't have access to mentors or YouTube tutorials. When I got stuck, I'd leave it, come back later, and keep going. It was isolating — programming without guidance or feedback. There were days when I wondered if it was worth the effort, especially when running into the same errors over and over.

It was an odd feeling — building something to help others while feeling somewhat disconnected myself.

After months of trial-and-error, sleepless nights, and a progress bar that seemed frozen in time, I finally held a working APK in my hands. I couldn't afford the $25 Play Store fee at first, but later I managed — and in 2018, I published it to the Play Store. It only had a few users, but it was real, and it worked.

That's where it all began.

Not with a goal of becoming a software engineer — but with a desire to solve a problem I saw around me.

I know it's probably not a big deal today, and maybe not even much of an achievement in the grand scheme of things. But I share this not to brag — just to give context. That's how it started. And I'm still learning, still building.