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  Updated:

  2026-04-10

I started programming at a very young age, and over the years, I have explored many areas, experienced plenty of burnout, and even considered leaving it entirely. This is my recount of that journey, and what I’ve learned along the way.

TL;DR: Minecraft got me into programming, I really got into it in high school, JavaScript and front-end made me hate it, and Rust made me love it again (and more than I had before). I also learned:

1. Learning by doing is great, but it can never replace the need for plain learning
2. Documenting is as important, if not more, than learning and doing
3. I’d rather do less, but do it right. I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist, but I am quite restless about quality.

Elementary & Middle School

In the years following, I picked up Python, experimented with Arduinos (C), and made games in Unreal Engine 4.

On of my teachers started an FLL (FIRST Lego League) team in 7th grade. I joined, did pretty well, and was invited to join the high school FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) team the next year.

FIRST Robotics Competition

FRC really sparked something in me; it was the happiest I had been in years. I would live and breathe FRC, spending 6 hours in the shop only to go home and work or learn more about it.

I improved more than I ever had as a programmer in this time, and was quickly promoted to lead programmer. I learned more than just new Java concepts – how to architect, make reliable & performant code, work with multiple programmers, control theory (!), and more. At this time, I also went beyond robotics programming, learning full-stack programming (HTML, JS, CSS, Google Cloud, Angular) to make dashboards for the robot and a website for the team.

I started getting into the physical robot more – leaning into the design side, and eventually learning CAD. By the time I was a Sophomore, I liked design more than programming, and started feeling like mechanical engineering was my path.

Extra Stories

Riptide

In my Freshman year, many active members graduated, making the team quite small. At the same time, we were struggling to recruit members. Although we were in California, STEM was not particularly highlighted at my school, and if anything, it was looked down upon. Along with that, most people at the school had no idea what we were even doing (and how cool the robots were!).

While we could show more people our robot, I knew we could do something better – make a cooler robot (that was painted too). Over the summer, I convinced my team to build a t-shirt cannon robot. We spent months prototyping, planning, designing, and eventually, building it.

When the school year started, we brought it to assemblies, football games, and parades. This massively helped the team with recruitment, getting a ton more people to our first meeting. I was particularly proud of this project because it brings robotics to people who would otherwise be uninterested and fosters a love of STEM.

HighTide

After my Freshman year, the team was more dedicated than ever. We met more than ever, even in the off-season. Over the summer, we not only built Riptide, but also HighTide.

HighTide gave us a low stakes environment to try out new things:

• painting the robot
• a proper 2-state elevator with constant force springs
• CADing the entire robot
• CNCing many more parts, including custom gearboxes
• a new code architecture

I think HighTide is most impressive when compared to previous robots from our team:

Tsunami

Our 2020 season was set up perfectly. We had a great team, a ton of resources, and made two robots in our off-season (Riptide & HighTide – see above).

We went even further than with HideTide – CADing the entire robot down to each rivet and designing everything from scratch (every gearbox custom, even one with a PTO!). It was certainly my proudest work on the team, and I’m sure others felt that way.

We showed up to the Central Valley Regional, set up our pit, talking to many teams, and went to bed. We were so excited, this was our year. But after waking up, we learned that the whole event was shut down for COVID-19.

COVID-19

Over COVID (my Junior year), my family decided to move to Maine. I continued to help out my FRC team as much as possible. I built out upgrades to the codebase, including full simulation (which was almost necessary in COVID) and an entirely new dashboard.

I met Julia Schatz on the FRC Discord, and she offered to help me learn PCB design. She gave me a ton of resources, direct help, and would review designs. Julia was an amazing mentor, and I am super appreciative of this.

I slowly got better at PCB design and EE, building more and more ambitious boards. Later, I taught myself SystemVerilog and started working with FPGAs. With my CAD, PCB, and HDL skills, I was able to make Virtex, an 815fps IR machine vision camera, which does all image processing on an FPGA. It was an ambitious project, and really pushed me.

The start of COVID was a lot of web programming, which I grew to hate, and the rest was almost entirely ECE-related. This really cemented my choice of major in college – ECE. It was a hard decision for me; I had always imagined myself as a programmer, but it felt right.

College

Freshman Year

I couldn’t get an ECE-related internship that summer, but, I did get a CS internship at Phreesia (C#/.NET). I began watching a lot of programming content on YouTube (notably ThePrimeagen), learned Go, started some small personal projects. After over a year off, I was back to programming!

Sophomore Year

When the school year came around, I kept programming. One day, I decided I was going to learn Rust, simply because I thought it was cool. I knew it was going to be hard, so I took a different approach to learning it – actually sitting down to learn it, before jumping into projects.

I’d been interested in languages before (notably Go), but Rust really piqued my interest. I read Rust resources, blogs, and watched Rust content – all the time. Every project I worked on was in Rust. It was a positive feedback loop: I spent so much time learning about and working in the language, that I became better at it, which made me want to spend more time learning and working in it.

Coming back to seriously programming felt different this time; I wasn’t programming or learning for a specific outcome, I genuinely loved doing it. Realizing this, brought me to a hard decision: I still have time to change my career path to CS, should I?

• Across my life, I’ve been more interested in CS:

  • Since I learned programming, I’ve really only taken  1.5 years off (and part of that was Freshman year, where I took everything off)
  • I only seriously did ECE outside of school for ~1.5 years in high school (nothing in college)
• I was a lot better at CS
• Was I really going to let my distaste for JavaScript and front-end spoil all of CS for me?
• Did I love FPGAs and chip design, or did I just love that SystemVerilog was low level?

Obviously, a lot more went into this discussion. But I clearly already knew the answer, and changed my MS to CS. This is also when I started daily driving Arch Linux + NeoVim and started my homelab!

Junior Year

Junior year, I seriously put the throttle down. I started big solo-projects, that I actually completed (which I hadn’t really done before): an iCalendar library, an ESPHome library, opensleep v1, and igloo v1.

After taking CS 4536 (Programming Languages), I was hooked. I made a few experimental languages with various lexers (hand rolled, Logos) and various parsers (rust-peg, LALRPOP, hand rolled LL(k)).

Before my summer internship started, my projects became a full time job. Notably, this is when I started opensleep v2 and igloo v2.

Senior Year (Now)

After wrapping up my internship, I completed opensleep v2 and published it. I’ve spent of the rest of the of the year working on igloo v2 (which is my Major Qualifying Project) and both versions of this website.

I’ve been super happy with all of these projects, and they’ve taught me a lot. I particularly loved the reverse-engineering and systems level programming in Opensleep. While it wasn’t the intention of the project, Igloo (and Jon Gjengset!) made me fall in love with hyper-optimization, and I really got into the weeds.

This website was also super fun, from a technical perspective and because it got me into technical writing. I was bad it and didn’t enjoy it, but very slowly improved. I still don’t think I’m a great writer, but I’m a lot better a clearly explaining my ideas. Writing helped me more than I thought – it serves as a reference for me, helps me think through decisions, forces me to justify those decisions, and highlights gaps in my knowledge.

Conclusion

Sometimes I wish my CS journey went differently – that I spent more time learning instead of doing, sought mentorship, was better at C++, tried harder to get better internships, or didn’t always try to do massive projects which I couldn’t complete. But, I can’t be happier with where am I know and what I’ve accomplished. Through this extremely non-linear, mostly self-guided journey I’ve managed to achieve a lot.