Peeyush Singh

“Every coder has a story, and mine began with curiosity. I still remember the first time I stumbled upon the world of programming—it felt like uncovering a new superpower. It was in my 10th standard when I first got introduced to HTML (HTML is not a programming language anyway), but there was this project we got for our summer projects, and I come from a very small town in India. This was back in 2017 when coding was not as mainstream as it is today, so I got to know that one of my friend’s fathers, who eventually owned a cyber café, knew programming. I enrolled in his café with a bunch of friends and learned HTML and CSS, not JavaScript, as JS was not my cup of tea (not even today). After I passed my 10th (with surprisingly good marks), I got my first laptop. I wanted a Mac, to be honest, because I was, and I still am, amazed by the Apple UI—it’s perfect 🤌. I wanted to learn the Swift programming language so that I could build projects that suit the Apple ecosystem. I got a Lenovo IdeaPad instead. Anyway, I was happy, and I thought, let’s learn C++ since it would be taught in my 11th, and also Swift is based on Objective-C. At that time, I didn’t know the difference. So I learned C++ from a book called “Let Us C.” Back then, the internet wasn’t cheap (it still isn’t), and there were very few YouTube tutorials. In my 11th, I had learned C++, so I came to know about this crazy thing called “Arduino,” and my god, it changed my life (back then). For the very first time, I witnessed that you could blink an LED with an if-else statement. You could literally make an array of Diwali lights. Oh god, those were the good days. Since I had learned to program in Arduino, I made an “Obstacle Avoiding Robot Car,” and I named it “VR Copycat.” The reason why I named it “VR Copycat” was that there was a group that used to envy me. So they brought the Arduino Uno and made a similar project to mine on radar technology, which they claimed to be a radar project but was using an ultrasonic sensor. Just to shut them off, I named my project metaphorically, “We are copycats.” I tried to pull off that massy Bollywood-level shit back then, and we lost the competition because my partner had one job: to bring good-quality batteries. And he messed up in that too. Those were the days. That was pretty much it, that’s why I chose Computer Science and Engineering. (If you’ve read this far, you’re probably older than me—my generation rarely has this much patience. But if you’re a peer sneaking a peek into my profile, hey bro, wassup?)