I had always thought that getting good grades was the one road to success. “Study your books hard during university, and it will all pay off at the end” is what everyone told me. I did that, but I did not feel satisfied. As a result, I began resenting books, and started to slack off, and hung out with other dissatisfied people; my life was going down the drain. My grades suffered, I became lazy and distant from my loved ones. I kept trying to change myself, but laziness always won over me. I had thought all hope was lost for me. My life operated on one rule: I have tomorrow, so I will do it tomorrow. Little did I know that the weekend of September 27th would change my view of life.
‘Ring’ ‘Ring’, my phone woke me up. It was 7:30 pm. I had fallen asleep when I got home from work (my third co-op). When I picked up the phone, it was my sister and she said, “I am signing you up for this hackathon called Pakathon, which is in 4 days, and you are going to attend it.” The word ‘hackathon’ gave me a scare, as I lacked programming skills. “I am not even that good at programming. Learning Scheme does not qualify me for a hackathon,” I replied. “Too bad, prepare for it because I am signing you up”. My sister finalized my decision for me, and hung up.
To not look like a complete idiot at the hackathon, I pushed myself over the next four days to learn about hackathons and some basics of JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Remembering the syntax for the languages was painful, so I started to make notes (More work for me!). The more I learned the programming languages, the more I enjoyed them. I was amazed at the cool things I was bringing to life by learning to code in HTML and CSS.
The day came, and I was off to the hackathon. I was amazed at the intensity of the participants; people with different backgrounds were present, and were exchanging ideas like geniuses. I kind of felt dumb in front of them.
The teams were formed, and I became the design guru of my team. We had the idea of providing online tuition for students of Pakistan. We developed and presented it in front of everyone on the last day. When the results were announced, we came in third place.
After I got home from the hackathon, I fell on my bed, tired and just wanting to sleep. But I could not fall asleep. I was thinking about all the cool tech related tools I had missed out on during my time from just sticking to my books and feeling depressed about life. I started to think that I should not waste my time being lazy, and ought to learn something cool. I took my laptop out, and looked for JavaScript, HTML and CSS tutorials online. I came across Unity3D game development, and have been learning it ever since, alongside C#/JavaScript. Currently, I have developed two games: one called ‘Pumpkin Blowups’, where a player must shoot pumpkins randomly appearing on the screen, and a space shooter where the player must destroy oncoming meteors while travelling through space. I learned more about web development and made a personal website. My next goals are to further improve upon my game development skills, and learn as much as I can about Google Chrome extensions.
