My Journey towards CSE and Programming

Hello guys, I am Vamsi Varun. This is my first blog post. Hope you like it and forgive me for my English :P

In this, I am going to tell you about my journey from a crazy guy to a coding enthusiastic. Those were the days when I got my engineering entrance exam (EAMCET) results. My rank was 13,129, of course not what I've expected. My guess was it would be below 10k! This unexpected rank is one of the effects of bifurcation of our state(Andhra Pradesh). I was enjoying a lot after exam till the results. No initial thoughts about my life and further proceedings.
At that time(Even now also) when it comes to choosing Engineering as their choice, parents used to see more about college rather than the branch and interest of the kids like me  ;P
But my parents left that tough task for me to choose my own interested branch. It was a tough task because when you have to take an important decision about something, that you had never thought about in your life, then it would be tough to you always for sure.

Towards Computer Science:

                                Then the million dollar question came into picture! Which branch I have to choose???? It's one of the most important decision anyone can take in their life I feel. Rather than choosing a branch randomly and then exploring your interest afterwards, it's better to choose a branch which you are interested in and working on it will save a lot of important time in your life.
At last, I chose Computer Science after many thoughts, reading many articles and lots of discussion with so-called successful people in my family. Some say to choose something innovative and rare branches like Petroleum etc. so that you will have less competition and more jobs. Some advised me to choose evergreen branches like EEE, CIVIL and MECH. Some warned me not to choose EEE because it's tough and also CSE because the IT industry will have up and down's frequently and no jobs are available in IT sector. But very few said know your interest first and then proceed accordingly.

I never thought about myself till then seriously. I am very interested in cricket at that time and even thought to be a cricketer. But later I left that thought. Coming to my interests I've started thinking about my childhood. It was my fifth class I guess, my father bought a computer with LCD screen(recently released in the market at that time), printer and fixed it in our room. In my village, my house is one of the few houses to have a computer at that time. I don't know anything about the computer except it is called a computer and we can type anything we want(it was the effect of movies). I had very few friends at that time to play with me and I needed to recreate myself on something. In front of me, there was a slim monitor with a beautiful keyboard to type whatever I want. Slowly I learned to turn it on from my father and used to play games and watch movies. From then I never looked back I keep exploring everything in it and after a few months, I know more about than my father knows about the computer.
                             Once my father kept password protection to control my addiction on it. But I never kept myself back. I used to type random passwords but failed. But tried many things, whether you believe or not I myself explored every possibility and finally found a way to delete the password by going through safe mode :) I felt that was the great achievement at that time for me than getting good marks!
My father shocked and never kept the password again! This time he shifted the computer to his workplace ;) That kind of interest was there for me at that time towards a computer. Coming to the present I know that I am strong at Mathematics and logics as well. I used to solve puzzles from newspapers. Out of 78 marks in EAMCET, I got 50 marks in Mathematics alone. Keeping all these in my mind I decided to go towards Computer Science.

 Towards Programming:

                                      Till then I was using desktop for playing games and watching movies and many more fun things. But for the first time after coming to B.Tech, I thought to use the computer for a better purpose. I explored the various areas in the computer science field and found that in any area, programming is the base for everything. Programming is nothing but talking to a computer in the form of instructions and assigning the tasks, in a language understood by it. C Language is such a kind which I  was eagerly waited to learn in my first semester. I should mention my friend Karthik VG here for sure. He is the one who used to challenge me constantly by giving some tasks like "print a text with printf without using semicolon" etc., Without him, I would have been normal in my class like other guys if he hadn't taught me about self-learning. We became good friends as we both have similar interests and started doing competitive programming in online coding sites like Hackerearth, codechef etc. There were very few people in my class who were good at coding at that time. So we always had a feeling of being something special. We won prizes in coding competitions.
                              We wanted to increase coding culture in our college. So we initiated a college level coding competition called Mr./ Miss Coder VIIT in which the college's best coder title will be given to the winning team. After this, we attended ACM ICPC Regionals at Chennai and Amritapuri as well. Later I personally established Vignan Coding Club along with 2 of our juniors and started conducting weekly contests at hackerearth to our college folks from all the years. The main motto of this coding club is to get them familiar with Competitive Programming Culture and motivate them to participate in ACM ICPC.
Our journey keep going this way till now!

Things that experience thought me:

• Know your passion and go with it. Never listen to others.
• Keep challenging always be it with others or with yourself. Always keep yourself in the competition till the end. Follow never give up strategy.
• Keep yourself consistent otherwise, you are the one who is giving chance to others to cross you.
• Self-learning is the thing you must learn. It will help you throughout your life.
• Be motivated always. Read inspiring stories whenever you feel backed.
• Planning ahead will always keep you in high.
• In the computer science field, sometimes smart work pays off than hard work.  

Goodbye folks, have a nice day and keep visiting my blog :)