Three Months Into Building Software

Three months in. Still learning. Still doubting. Still building.

Three months ago I started working at Arena. Sometimes I look at my GitHub profile and almost every day is green now. I spend most of my day coding, fixing bugs, thinking about databases, APIs and features. If someone looked from the outside they would probably say that I am a software engineer now. But honestly, I still don't completely feel like one.

I think a lot of it comes from not having a computer science degree. Somewhere in my mind there has always been this fear that even if I became really good at writing software, companies would still choose someone with a CS degree over me. It feels irrational at times because nobody has actually told me that, but it is a fear that has followed me for a long time. Maybe that is why I keep trying to learn faster than I need to.

The strange thing is that Arena has given me something that I don't think many entry level developers get. There isn't someone deciding the architecture for me. Nobody is assigning me tiny Jira tickets or telling me exactly how to solve a problem. Most of the design decisions are mine. The tech stack is mine. The database decisions are mine. Even the user experience is something I have to think about. Every feature that goes into production is something I was responsible for.

That is exciting but it is also scary. If I make a bad decision, I have to live with it. If I over engineer something, I have to maintain it. If I make the application simpler and it helps people, then that is because I made the right trade off. I think this responsibility has taught me more than any tutorial or course could have.

The funny thing is that I still don't feel like I have learned anything substantial. I know that sounds weird because I spend hours coding every day, but most of my learning comes from solving problems that appear in front of me. Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken another internship that paid more. Then I realise that I probably would not have been trusted with building an entire platform there. Here I get to think like an engineer instead of just writing code.

A few days ago Aman bhai proposed a target for the company. Fifty lakh rupees in revenue by the end of the year. At first it sounded like one of those optimistic startup numbers. Then I started doing the maths in my notebook. If an average international shipment is around ₹5,000, that means roughly one thousand bookings. Suddenly it didn't sound impossible anymore.

Then another thought came into my head.

If we actually reach those numbers, the application I am building won't just be another project sitting on my GitHub. It would be handling bookings worth lakhs of rupees. That is a weird feeling. There is pressure in that thought, but there is also something satisfying about it. One line on my resume would suddenly mean a lot more because there would be actual business behind it.

Thinking Beyond Code

Over the last few months I have also noticed that my thinking has changed. Earlier I used to think almost entirely about writing code. Now I spend more time thinking about trade offs. Should I cache this? Is this query going to scale? Should this feature be simple even if it means writing more code behind the scenes? How do I make something that someone isn't technical can use without thinking? I don't know if this is system design yet, but I can definitely feel myself moving in that direction.

Outside of work there is another thing that I want to bring back into my life.

Reading.

Somewhere along the way I stopped reading fiction. Every free hour slowly got replaced by my laptop. Documentation replaced novels. GitHub replaced books. I don't regret it because these last few months have been important, but I think I miss getting lost in stories.

I want to restart The Master and Margarita. I left it halfway through and I barely remember where. I also want to read One Hundred Years of Solitude again. The first time I read it I was completely confused. I kept losing track of all the José Arcadios and Aurelianos, but even then there was something about that book that stayed with me. I think some books are not meant to be understood in one reading. Maybe you have to grow a little before you come back to them.

Why I'm Writing

I have also been thinking about writing more. Not because people say you should build a personal brand or because writing is good for getting a job. I think writing forces me to organise my thoughts. It tells me whether I actually understand something or whether I have just watched three YouTube videos about it.

The more AI becomes part of our everyday lives, the more I think original thought will matter. AI can write paragraphs in seconds. What it cannot do is live your experiences for you. It cannot spend months building a logistics platform, making bad architectural decisions, fixing them again and then writing about what changed your mind. That part is still ours.

I don't know where all of this leads. Maybe nowhere. Maybe this blog will only ever be read by a handful of people. But I think I would rather have a small collection of honest thoughts than hundreds of posts that sound like everyone else on the internet.

So I am going to keep building.

And I am going to start reading again.

I think those two things will probably make each other better.