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Hello World!

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Hey there! I'm Abhiram Reddy. I'm a 19-year-old who loves to try new things and I'm probably one of the last people you'd expect to start a blog. So, in this post, I figured that I should provide some context.

Backstory

I'm currently a student but I've done some pretty interesting stuff too. I was a professional badminton athlete who had once represented India in a youth international tournament in Indonesia. My stint with the sport spanned most of my teenage years, but eventually, I had to give it up.

If there was one thing that I learned from the sport, it was that performance trumps everything. I also picked up a skill that I think is really handy and that's self-learning. My training schedule used to be so packed that it was impossible to dedicate time to go to school. So, learning things on my own seemed like the most obvious thing to do. Eventually, I grew accustomed to exploring things that I found intriguing.

After a couple of years, I joined as an engineering undergraduate at Mahindra University. Soon, I was introduced to the idea of freelancing and I found it appealing. Learning a skill and earning money by providing value to others seemed like an amazing thing to do. It didn't take too long for me to realize that I had zero valuable skills. I immediately began doing a bit of research and I decided to go with web development as it seemed to be easier to pick up and creating applications felt like a cool thing to do.

The Lockdown

Fortunately, the lockdown accelerated my learning curve. I was spending a lot of my time on online communities like Team Tanay and the Avalon Army. One day, I came across the Team Tanay Job Challenge. It required all the participants to create 5 projects, write 3 blog posts and get 2 reviews on their projects. Upon completion, you were eligible to apply for the jobs and internships offered through Tanay Pratap's connections. A month after the challenge had commenced, I decided that I should give it a shot as I was working on improving my skills anyway. I was almost positive that I wouldn't be able to complete the challenge before the deadline, but I am glad that I stuck with it.

My First Internship Offer

I ended up receiving an internship offer just after I completed my second project. In fact, the reason I was even offered one was because Tanay Pratap had retweeted my project, and Hirday, the founder of the startup, OPD One, found the job challenge really interesting. One day, he had stumbled upon a project I had shared on Twitter. I was elated when he reached out to me and soon, we hopped on a Zoom call to have a chat. Although both of us were optimistic about working together, my skills were not sufficient at that time. The code at the startup was written in React and I was not well-versed in it. Luckily, Hirday was willing to give me an opportunity to prove myself. We decided that the best way to go about it was by creating a project in React. I promised that I'll get it done within a week and Hirday helped me out by providing suggestions for any kinds of problems I encountered.

He liked what I was able to come up with in a week and I was over the moon when I was finally accepted as an intern. That was about two months ago.

The Present

I'm enjoying working with the team at my internship. I'm learning a lot of exciting stuff and I've been introduced to a whole new world of opportunities. I finally decided that it's a good time to start writing about my experiences for two reasons:

  • I want to have a log of them. Although I am pretty outgoing in all my ventures, I tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. I feel that this is because of my poor refactoring abilities and I'd like to change that by reflecting more on my experiences.

  • I think that by sharing this information, others can adopt the things that worked for me and sidestep some of the mistakes that I've made.

I'm really thrilled about sharing my journey with others. I'll be posting regularly and I hope that you'll find reading the posts as enjoyable as I do writing them!