✍️ This story is part of my series, Dev Uncaged —where I share unscripted stories that have shaped the developer and builder in me.
🖼️ The illustrations in this post are auto-generated using BlogCanvas—a tool I’m building for creators and bloggers to illustrate key moments effortlessly and stay focused on telling compelling stories.
Here’s Dev Story 1—my first ever taste of digital creation. Hope it brings back memories for some of you!
The year was 1993, the beginning of my 4th grade… We headed through the hallway in excitement towards the computer lab. None of us had seen a real computer before. We were about to interact with the magical mystery box that had lived in our imagination so far. On the way, I recollected a statement about a famous Indian comic character, Chacha Chaudhary:
"Chacha Chaudhary ka dimaag computer se bhi tez chalta hai." (a Hindi phrase)
(Translation: Chacha Chaudhary’s brain works faster than a computer.)
We finally arrived… and the door opened, with a cold breeze of the AC welcoming us… In front of us were around a dozen white magical boxes arranged evenly in the room. Each computer had a monitor sitting on top of a CPU, a floppy disk drive (probably 8-inch or 5 ¼-inch), and a keyboard.
Every one of us got a dedicated computer. After giving us a brief tour, our teacher asked us to open our notebooks and type the first LOGO program we were taught—to draw a rectangle.
We all began typing… It took us time to navigate the keyboard, looking for the right keys. We would skim through the keyboard using pointed fingers, sometimes taking forever to find a single character. Most of the time, we were looking down at the keyboard, and once in a while, when we glanced at the monitor in front of us, we were greeted with typos.
Huh… and after all that effort of typing, when we hit the run button, the program still didn’t work for many. However, I could see some happy faces—those whose programs worked. They were super excited, some even loudly seeking attention for their success.
I stared at my screen, defeated. The cursor blinked, mocking me.
The teacher finally arrived, scanned my code, and in just a few keystrokes—boom! A rectangle appeared.
It was amusing to see how a set of instructions translated into a geometric shape.
Over the entire year, I wrote a lot of programs to draw different shapes. My most memorable one was a circle-drawing program, which sparked my curiosity even further into the world of programming…
But then there was a pause… a long pause…
The next year, I had to move to a different city. My new school didn’t even have a computer lab.
Two years later, another school. This time, there was a good computer lab, but no real programming for us—just learning basic command-line prompts, playing games, and drawing.
It was the year 2000 when I finally got back to programming in my 11th grade as a major subject…
I was reading about Bill Gates in those days and was fascinated by his story of how he had built Windows OS. I was an average student but started becoming very aspirational. I started seeing programming as a magic wand—something that could bring one's creation to life without much capital investment.
So, with all the excitement, after a five-year pause, I stepped back into programming… but the pedagogy and curriculum soon killed my motivation. It became like any other subject—dry! I couldn’t see what I could do with it. For passing exams, I would just memorize the programs.
But… nearing the end of my 11th grade, something happened… Little did I know, it was about to reignite my interest in programming—and this time, it wouldn’t fade away.
Find out in the next Dev Story…
