This feels way more valuable than most of the optimal road maps I've seen online.
Blud career mogs me to death
tales from the basement.
@imontheloose can help
C (the Arduino stuff you’ll be fine with, don’t worry), C++, MATLAB, Python, Java.
I initially wanted to frame into the ideal way to get into tech. Like this is the best way but when I sat down to recollect my thoughts and reflect on all that I did. I realized I made a ton of mistakes. So I'll just talk about what I did and then say things what I would have done differently in hindsight. My path wasn't linear it was complete chaos at first but then I found myself started building my profile through bits and pieces.
I'll start from the beginning. I was always a bright student since childhood. I graduated 4th in class with 95% in everything and after months of grind got admitted to a tier 1 University. I can't reveal which university because the cohort sizes are small but just think a university in the same tier as IIT Bombay. Top CEOs, Founders and entrepreneurs are part of the alumini group. One more thing to note is my uni doesn't have an attendance policy so I was able to rot doing freelance stuff and whatever I wanted and had plenty of free time to do all this but your mileage may vary.
I was always interested in coding. I already talked about it here
My earliest memories of coding on an android phone
I don't know if kids still do this now or if it is relevant in 2025 but some of my earliest memories of writing code (scripts really) was for on cheat engine and game guardian. I got gifted a smartphone on my 13th Birthday. I don't quite remember what it was. I think it was samsung s6 looking...looksmax.org
But I never considered it seriously and going in. I didn't know what to expect. I just knew that is what I wanted. So I got admitted into the uni after some counselling rounds and was late admissions. Throughout my journey one thing you'll consistently see is my entire hyper competitive attitude towards everything. My motivation was always pure hyper competitiveness and Envy. Both I inherited from my father. I just cant stand seeing someone get even a step ahead of me. Every time it happens I feel this burning jealousy inside. So you'll see me trying a lot of things trying to find something sticks to the one wall and one upping everyone
Year 1: Admission
I did very well in the entrance exam to got into one of the best unis in the country. Felt like I was on top of the world but uni was a reality check profs don't spoon-feed and the competition is savage. Everyone around me was genius. I felt like I didn't belong here. Everyone was an
ace in their field and I felt dumber everytime I talked to them but I was determined and jealous.
One advantage/disadvantage of going to a prestigious university.
One major pro and con of going to a prestigious uni is being constantly surrounded by certified winners. Every single person in my uni has always been a winner. The main charecter all his/her life with an epic story. National Olympiad medals, founding startups in high school, breezing through...
Joining every club. hackathons, coding comps, startup pitches. Tried app dev, ML side projects... most tanked because I didn't know what I was doing. I tried learning advanced concepts and algorithms without the basics foundation..like I start learning react frameworks for frontend work when I did not even know html and css properly. My advice do the basics first pick any language and double down. It doesn't matter. Python, C++ they are all good. Just stick to the basics, learn them all well and move to the web trinity
Master the Web Trinity:
HTML: The skeleton of every webpage. Learn semantic HTML
CSS: The styling. Understand the box model Flexbox, and Grid. Maybe even tailwind a
JavaScript (Vanilla):Master DOM manipulation, events, and asynchronous concepts (like fetch for APIs) before touching any frameworks
I am linking a few good resources that I've heard good things about
HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page's appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript).developer.mozilla.org
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.
The Modern JavaScript Tutorial
Modern JavaScript Tutorial: simple, but detailed explanations with examples and tasks, including: closures, document and events, object oriented programming and more.javascript.info
Year 2-Finding a Footing and my freelance work
By 2nd year. All my fundamentals were strong and I was building websites. This is the first website I ever deployed and built. From scratch
On this day 3 years ago. I deployed my very first app
Was scrolling through my old GitHub repos and found this Room Booking System I built for a college project in my 2nd year od unj. The requirement was just a basic CRUD site, but I don't do basic. Average is not in my dictionary. So I went overboard and added as much depth as possible to show...
I saw seniors flexing FAANG offers via DSA, so I locked in. Striver's DSA Sheet was the plug and started Grinding problems and Freelance popped off because I wanted to make money. Focused on full-stack web dev on Upwork/Fiverr and was getting paid peanuts for my work but I did not mind because I was just getting started and was navigating everything and that amount was still huge for college grad. My parents paid for evrything so all that was essentially free money for me. My pitch was "I build and deploy." Landed 15-16 gigs ($200-$1k each). These weren't just simple sites. I was building MERN stack e-commerce platforms with Stripe/Razorpay integration and custom sales analytics dashboards for marketing agencies using React and APIs. Tried a blockchain NFT project (flopped hard) then built a Flutter app for a client ($700) and also did some DSA tutoring for my juniors. I also did a bunch of online internships for modest pay just for the experience and to get a hang off all the technologies.
Now coming the DSA. This is the single most important topic for technical interviews. In the real it doesn't have a lot of use unless you are in big tech like Google, microsoft where every millisecond costs money. DSA used to be very important back in the day when a computers were the sizes of entire rooms but nowadays not as much because systems have become exponentially powerful.In the startups I interned at double for loops were the norm because shaving off a few ms isn't important they don't have that much scale. So in all honesty DSA isn't "necessary" but I still highly recommend learning DSA.Striver's is god tier for interview logic it teaches patterns, not just memorization and also Solving 300+ problems made interviews look childs play but 200 would've sufficed. A better alternative for speed is NeetCode 150 or the Blind 75.
Although after this grind biggest realization is my big freelance projects gave me more resume juice and talking points than LeetCode ever did
I also started doing competitive coding on leetcode and hacker rank and did some hackathon and won a few. Participating in the contests simulates interview pressure.
For the MERN stack. This is the gold standard. Wait for a sale you can get this for cheaper. It covers everything from basics to deployment.
React 16: The Complete Course (incl. React Router 4 & Redux)
Dive in and learn React.js from scratch! Learn React, Hooks, Redux, React Router, Next.js, Best Practices and way more!www.udemy.com
You absolutely must know Git and GitHub. This is how all professional software teams collaborate
Also Learn how to use tools like Postman to test API endpoints and how to use fetch or axios in your frontend to communicate with a backend.
For full stack deployments. I recommend Render and Vercel. Render also has its on DB that you can use
Vercel: Build and deploy the best web experiences with the AI Cloud – Vercel
Vercel gives developers the frameworks, workflows, and infrastructure to build a faster, more personalized web.vercel.com
Cloud Application Platform
Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS certificates, global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.render.com
Also do not neglect any of the CS fundamentals like Operating Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Networks and system design. Which exact topics. I'll talk about later
Year 3-The specialization
Year 2 was great but FOMO hit hard. I saw peers specializing and landing crazier gigs and making even more money.. The pivot to DevOps wasn't a random choice. it was a market signal.Why DevOps? My freelance clients loved the apps but were clueless about deployment. I always used to get this question, How do we get this online and make sure it doesn't crash? came up on every big gig. That was my lightbulb moment. Every developer needs to know how to ship their own code. And this where I urge you to make a choice. Either double down on software development or specialise in something. The job market is competitive af so you need to be really good at something to get hired.
Companies aren't looking for well rounded but people with spikes of deep knowledge in their domains so pick one and specialise. So I started learning DevOps while continuing to solve harder DSA problems and strengthening my fundamentals
I used KodeKloud for hands-on labs and studied for the AWS Certified Developer Associate and Solutions Architect. You could do the beginner Cloud Practitioner certificate but imo it's too basic to be out on a resume. AWS is a industry certificate. This one.
certified-developer-associate
Earn your AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification. We offer training courses, exam guides, sample test questions, and practice exams.aws.amazon.com
certified-solutions-architect-associate
Category, Associate. Exam duration, 130 minutes. Exam format, 65 questions; either multiple choice or multiple response. Cost, 150 USD.
You could also learn Azure cloud. A few weeks back I checked it and I liked it very much. AWS still has more services but Azure isn't far behind
Microsoft Azure is so mogger
I was just revisiting Microsoft Azure after around a year or so. I mainly work on AWS and GCP. Not a lot of Azure but I've been seeing a lot of Job posting for Azure so I decided to take a look and damn. Son. They've expanderDevOps tooling. Pipelines, Repos, Boards, Test Plans all...
More stuff I learnt was I mastered Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), Terraform, and Cl/CD with GitHub Actions.
Marketed myself as a "Full-Stack + DevOps" expert. This let me charge a premium.Landed 8 massive gigs ($2k-$6k) building and deploying a multi-tenant SaaS platform for a startup with auto-scaling infrastructure on AWS. My GPA also took a hit because I was pretty much working full time at this point so i couldn't focus well in my studies but this paid off massively later.
I won't get too much into detail on this part because this path is going to vary wildly on what domain you specialize in. You could get a rough idea on where to begin from this website
DevOps Roadmap: Learn to become a DevOps Engineer or SRE
Learn to become a modern DevOps engineer by following the steps, skills, resources and guides listed in our community-driven roadmap.roadmap.sh
Year 4: US Internship Bag the oayoff.
All the chaos culminated here. I applied to 100+ roles, flexing my freelance portfolio and DevOps expertise. Got rejected more times than I count. I legit felt heart broken after every rejection email but I kept applying and finally after months.Bagged a lucrative internship at a US tech firm in Seattle and California ($12k/month, flights/housing covered). My "I've built and deployed real-world applications for paying clients" story resonated way more than a perfect GPA. My boss told me he was impressed the second he saw my application. They couldn't fill the role for nearly 7 months and I came in at a critical time so they hired me immediately and I was given work from day 1. Now about the interview.
This wasn't your standard DSA-heavy loop. It was a practical assessment of my skills.
1. Online Assessment & HR Screen: The first filter was a standard online coding test with 1 LeetCode Mediums and one hard. It was one question on Hash maps and one on Dynamic Programming
followed by a quick call with a recruiter to discuss my resume and freelance experience. I crushed the DSA round the HR himself was surprised someone could solve it this quickly and told me about it on call.
2. Technical Shared Screen (1 Hour): This was a hybrid round. I solved one DSA problem (a tree traversal question) on a shared editor, and then spent 20 minutes answering questions about my MERN stack projects and my experience with Docker.
3. DevOps & System Design: This was a practical, scenario-based round. I don't remember the exact prompt but it was: "W Cl/CD pipeline for a full-stack application using GitHub Actions to deploy to AWS. I had to explain my choices for tools and architecture and all the problems that I might face. Also some technical questions. A few I remember are What is the benefit of using Terraform over manually creating resources in the AWS? Why would we use Kubernetes for this application instead of just Docker Compose on a single server
And after all these rounds I got selected and got an email congratulations. I legit was trying to hold back my tears when the email came. My parents called me and congratulated me. My father was proud of me and after all that grind it was done and then I flew to the United States and landed in Seattle. Was there for a few weeks before being moved to California. It was an amazing experience the i finally got to experience with cutting edge tech. The lectures that I got invited to were so interesting. I made a lot of friends also. My Jewish boss was nice af too. He literally mentored me like his own child. I made many powerful contacts and had a blast while still working as hard as possible to get the PPO. Countless sleepless nights. I even made threads talking about sleep problems due to being on call but my boss was empathetic to me
. He would let me take breaks for as long as possible and recognized all of my work and appreciated it within week of me working he assured me I will be given a PPO It is formal letter saying they the company will hire me after this time and he also told the Senior HR to fast track the H1B process and use all the connections he has got to get my H1B applications and stating I was too "valuable" to be let go
After that stint. I came back to India and was going to be filed for H1B but the company i worked at has off shored ak it's work so It remains to be seen if I will go back to the US or just WFH.
I am going back to my uni on 17th August
Finally wrapped up here. Heading back to finish my final year and earn my degree. My employer will submit my H-1B application next April, so now it's all in God's hand and depends on Mr. Trump decision now. whatever the universe has planned will be done. If the stars align I'll be back on this...
I also applied to bunch of other companies and got shortlisted and given job offers in the UK, US and India. Im still applying for jobs. Currently Product Manager jobs that is a bit different from the technical roles I'm used to.
View attachment 4177703View attachment 4177704
From the interviews that I've given. The main things you need to focus on would be these
Operating Systems (OS)- Process/Threads almost a guaranteed question around this topic. Also semaphore variables, mutex to prevent deadlocks and paging and segmentation problems these are the main topics that get asked
To learn OS you can use neetcode but the gold standard is the famous dinosaur book
View attachment 4177724
2. Computer Networks- OSI & TCP/IP Models- Important topics would be the OSI & TCP/IP Models. The Headers, DNS, HTTPS protocols all of it. Tbh i found my coursework material to suffice for most of the computer networks questions they ask in interviews. So I would just suggest doing some basic course in Udemy. They rarely ask deep questions about network unlike DSA
3. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)- In every single interview that I've sat for has asked OOPs concepts. Learning this is non negotiable. One sure shot question from one of the pillars Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. Learn them thoroughly. This is going to be asked. And it's easy unlike DSA so learn it thoroughly. Do a Udemy course
Learn Object Oriented Programming | Object Oriented Programming Tutorials
Learn about object oriented programming from top-rated Udemy instructors. Whether you’re interested in object oriented programming, or OOP in Python, Java, or C, Udemy courses will help you achieve your goals.www.udemy.com
4. System Design- This isn't as important and isn't as extensively asked as above. But it is the key to unlocking senior roles and interviews at MAANG-level companies less common for junior roles but still good to learn imo. I personally just watched a bunch of YouTube videos you can skip this concept tho atleast for now
Addressing the AI takeover-
I have to address this because the first comment to this post would be a Al doomer posts that the ChatGPT is coming for our jobs, GPT-5 will write entire codebases etc. You're looking at it all wrong. Al ironically made my life 10x easier.
In my 2nd year. My first website I coded it all from scratch and llms weren't advanced enough to do it but once LLMs could code. I started using and still use to write boilerplate code, unit tests, and simple functions for my MERN stacks. It probably cut my raw coding time by 30-40%. I still charged my clients the same project and. When I was deep into DevOps I used ChatGPT as a senior mentor and asked it to creat scripts and give me the basic framework to build it on and then tweak to make my life easier.
Figuring out what to write is 90% of software engineering. Not how to write. Coding is the easy part. The thing that takes time is debugging, reading documentation, communication with clients. AI is useful for front end work and boiler plate code but for the core logic part you still need a human unless you are okay with having inefficient one time use code with bugs and security vulnerabilities. Al can't talk to a client to figure out what they actually want, it can't design a complex system architecture from scratch, and it can't debug a weird, niche production issue at 3 AM That's still on you
The market doesn't pay you for the hours you spend typing. it pays you for the problems you solve and the value you deliver. Al helps you solve bigger problems, faster and people get paid because of what we call the knowledge gap. I know things that allow me to use AI in such a way that it can do all the work for me and correct the mistakes AI makes..this gap is what Devs exploit that is where the knowledge gap lies. That is what Devs take advantage off. Maybe once AI moves on from advanced pattern recognition and probability machine and can actually think with AGI these jobs will be gone but not now no..
That's it from me. Let me know if I missed something and if have any questions. Im going out now and will answer all your questions later. Thx
He’s just curry brah.
thanks, im not inherently good at coding but do you think if i just be consistent and try hard i can learn it? my teacher bought me code academy would that be helpful they said they give some certificate if i complete it
No one is born a good coder. Everyone around you at one point was no smarter than you. Anyone can learn these languages granted you have 90+IQ.
alright thanks bro, ill dedicate an hour a day maybe more this is my dream for now
Poor thing hasn’t saw Navier Stokes and control systems yet brah. @Jason Voorhees
Do electrical guys do assembly programming? And the kiel uvision thing?
We do assembly, yes. Not necessarily required for the degree, but you will use it, yes. Keil was more a thing suggested in the past. You’re given more free reign on these things nowadays.
You think IT would care if I didn’t extend my hb1 Visa ?
What are you rated on codeforces.com?
Good thread, bookmarked.
I'm not rated very highly. I haven’t been on it in about two years too. But I’m trying to get back into it.
Just state your Elo, you're anonymous. This is the current distribution on the site.
I actually agree with a lot of what you said. A strong academic foundation or at least being in a degree program. definitely opens doors. It is requirment for visa sponsorships
I'm not that anonymous. I'm < 1700 atm.
It’s not just about passing the interview per se, but it also gives you incredible confidence to learn anything else.
I tend to procrastinate a bit when it comes to deadlines.Mirin hard, which I had this level of discipline and motivation, I go to an elite public uni like I’m not dumb but my work ethic is horrid and I do almost zero extra carriculars. This will all bite me in the ass when I graduate
But yeah that’s a pretty insane story man congrats
Don't do that. One thing leads to another missed deadline. Do it like you'll die tomorrow.
Problem is I think the internet has nuked my ability to focus. I used to have tons of tabs open on my browser (like over 60 at time) of just random YouTube videos, random links, looksmax, etc, and I started to noticed I would actually have to watch one video for like 5 minutes, switch over to a random other tab, and then watch a completely different video for another 5 minutes. I don't want to take adderall and become a stimulant addicted zombie because the (((pharmaceutical companies))) just love to push drugs on people as a band-aid solution. I'm trying just to cut back slowly and only have 1-2 tabs open at a time max. I think that's how I'll slowly retrain my brain to be able to focus, and I think that will actually help my procrastination problem.
I'm also a rotter just look at how many posts I've made but yeah same thing I'll be scrolling or watching random stuff but at least I try to do things on the side like working on projects, studying a bit, or just trying to build something useful in between The dopamine hits from all the tabs and YouTube clips fry your attention span though so cutting down to 1-2 tabs sounds like a solid move.Slow detox > cold turkey.
Never got to take an standardized exams during high school but I was offered a job at my uni before taking classes to teach cloud concepts which helped me get my first internship freshman year at a decent company.
did good but basically burnt me out and i declined to return
I initially wanted to frame into the ideal way to get into tech. Like this is the best way but when I sat down to recollect my thoughts and reflect on all that I did. I realized I made a ton of mistakes. So I'll just talk about what I did and then say things what I would have done differently in hindsight. My path wasn't linear it was complete chaos at first but then I found myself started building my profile through bits and pieces.
I'll start from the beginning. I was always a bright student since childhood. I graduated 4th in class with 95% in everything and after months of grind got admitted to a tier 1 University. I can't reveal which university because the cohort sizes are small but just think a university in the same tier as IIT Bombay. Top CEOs, Founders and entrepreneurs are part of the alumini group. One more thing to note is my uni doesn't have an attendance policy so I was able to rot doing freelance stuff and whatever I wanted and had plenty of free time to do all this but your mileage may vary.
I was always interested in coding. I already talked about it here
My earliest memories of coding on an android phone
I don't know if kids still do this now or if it is relevant in 2025 but some of my earliest memories of writing code (scripts really) was for on cheat engine and game guardian. I got gifted a smartphone on my 13th Birthday. I don't quite remember what it was. I think it was samsung s6 looking...
But I never considered it seriously and going in. I didn't know what to expect. I just knew that is what I wanted. So I got admitted into the uni after some counselling rounds and was late admissions. Throughout my journey one thing you'll consistently see is my entire hyper competitive attitude towards everything. My motivation was always pure hyper competitiveness and Envy. Both I inherited from my father. I just cant stand seeing someone get even a step ahead of me. Every time it happens I feel this burning jealousy inside. So you'll see me trying a lot of things trying to find something sticks to the one wall and one upping everyone
Year 1: Admission
I did very well in the entrance exam to got into one of the best unis in the country. Felt like I was on top of the world but uni was a reality check profs don't spoon-feed and the competition is savage. Everyone around me was genius. I felt like I didn't belong here. Everyone was an
ace in their field and I felt dumber everytime I talked to them but I was determined and jealous.
One advantage/disadvantage of going to a prestigious university.
One major pro and con of going to a prestigious uni is being constantly surrounded by certified winners. Every single person in my uni has always been a winner. The main charecter all his/her life with an epic story. National Olympiad medals, founding startups in high school, breezing through...
Joining every club. hackathons, coding comps, startup pitches. Tried app dev, ML side projects... most tanked because I didn't know what I was doing. I tried learning advanced concepts and algorithms without the basics foundation..like I start learning react frameworks for frontend work when I did not even know html and css properly. My advice do the basics first pick any language and double down. It doesn't matter. Python, C++ they are all good. Just stick to the basics, learn them all well and move to the web trinity
Master the Web Trinity:
HTML: The skeleton of every webpage. Learn semantic HTML
CSS: The styling. Understand the box model Flexbox, and Grid. Maybe even tailwind a
JavaScript (Vanilla):Master DOM manipulation, events, and asynchronous concepts (like fetch for APIs) before touching any frameworks
I am linking a few good resources that I've heard good things about
HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page's appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript).
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS describes how elements should be rendered on screen, on paper, in speech, or on other media.
The Modern JavaScript Tutorial
Modern JavaScript Tutorial: simple, but detailed explanations with examples and tasks, including: closures, document and events, object oriented programming and more.
Year 2-Finding a Footing and my freelance work
By 2nd year. All my fundamentals were strong and I was building websites. This is the first website I ever deployed and built. From scratch
On this day 3 years ago. I deployed my very first app
Was scrolling through my old GitHub repos and found this Room Booking System I built for a college project in my 2nd year od unj. The requirement was just a basic CRUD site, but I don't do basic. Average is not in my dictionary. So I went overboard and added as much depth as possible to show...
I saw seniors flexing FAANG offers via DSA, so I locked in. Striver's DSA Sheet was the plug and started Grinding problems and Freelance popped off because I wanted to make money. Focused on full-stack web dev on Upwork/Fiverr and was getting paid peanuts for my work but I did not mind because I was just getting started and was navigating everything and that amount was still huge for college grad. My parents paid for evrything so all that was essentially free money for me. My pitch was "I build and deploy." Landed 15-16 gigs ($200-$1k each). These weren't just simple sites. I was building MERN stack e-commerce platforms with Stripe/Razorpay integration and custom sales analytics dashboards for marketing agencies using React and APIs. Tried a blockchain NFT project (flopped hard) then built a Flutter app for a client ($700) and also did some DSA tutoring for my juniors. I also did a bunch of online internships for modest pay just for the experience and to get a hang off all the technologies.
Now coming the DSA. This is the single most important topic for technical interviews. In the real it doesn't have a lot of use unless you are in big tech like Google, microsoft where every millisecond costs money. DSA used to be very important back in the day when a computers were the sizes of entire rooms but nowadays not as much because systems have become exponentially powerful.In the startups I interned at double for loops were the norm because shaving off a few ms isn't important they don't have that much scale. So in all honesty DSA isn't "necessary" but I still highly recommend learning DSA.Striver's is god tier for interview logic it teaches patterns, not just memorization and also Solving 300+ problems made interviews look childs play but 200 would've sufficed. A better alternative for speed is NeetCode 150 or the Blind 75.
Although after this grind biggest realization is my big freelance projects gave me more resume juice and talking points than LeetCode ever did
I also started doing competitive coding on leetcode and hacker rank and did some hackathon and won a few. Participating in the contests simulates interview pressure.
For the MERN stack. This is the gold standard. Wait for a sale you can get this for cheaper. It covers everything from basics to deployment.
React 16: The Complete Course (incl. React Router 4 & Redux)
Dive in and learn React.js from scratch! Learn React, Hooks, Redux, React Router, Next.js, Best Practices and way more!
You absolutely must know Git and GitHub. This is how all professional software teams collaborate
Also Learn how to use tools like Postman to test API endpoints and how to use fetch or axios in your frontend to communicate with a backend.
For full stack deployments. I recommend Render and Vercel. Render also has its on DB that you can use
Vercel: Build and deploy the best web experiences with the AI Cloud – Vercel
Vercel gives developers the frameworks, workflows, and infrastructure to build a faster, more personalized web.
Cloud Application Platform
Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS certificates, global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.
Also do not neglect any of the CS fundamentals like Operating Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Networks and system design. Which exact topics. I'll talk about later
Year 3-The specialization
Year 2 was great but FOMO hit hard. I saw peers specializing and landing crazier gigs and making even more money.. The pivot to DevOps wasn't a random choice. it was a market signal.Why DevOps? My freelance clients loved the apps but were clueless about deployment. I always used to get this question, How do we get this online and make sure it doesn't crash? came up on every big gig. That was my lightbulb moment. Every developer needs to know how to ship their own code. And this where I urge you to make a choice. Either double down on software development or specialise in something. The job market is competitive af so you need to be really good at something to get hired.
Companies aren't looking for well rounded but people with spikes of deep knowledge in their domains so pick one and specialise. So I started learning DevOps while continuing to solve harder DSA problems and strengthening my fundamentals
I used KodeKloud for hands-on labs and studied for the AWS Certified Developer Associate and Solutions Architect. You could do the beginner Cloud Practitioner certificate but imo it's too basic to be out on a resume. AWS is a industry certificate. This one.
certified-developer-associate
Earn your AWS Certified Developer - Associate certification. We offer training courses, exam guides, sample test questions, and practice exams.
certified-solutions-architect-associate
Category, Associate. Exam duration, 130 minutes. Exam format, 65 questions; either multiple choice or multiple response. Cost, 150 USD.
You could also learn Azure cloud. A few weeks back I checked it and I liked it very much. AWS still has more services but Azure isn't far behind
Microsoft Azure is so mogger
I was just revisiting Microsoft Azure after around a year or so. I mainly work on AWS and GCP. Not a lot of Azure but I've been seeing a lot of Job posting for Azure so I decided to take a look and damn. Son. They've expanderDevOps tooling. Pipelines, Repos, Boards, Test Plans all...
More stuff I learnt was I mastered Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), Terraform, and Cl/CD with GitHub Actions.
Marketed myself as a "Full-Stack + DevOps" expert. This let me charge a premium.Landed 8 massive gigs ($2k-$6k) building and deploying a multi-tenant SaaS platform for a startup with auto-scaling infrastructure on AWS. My GPA also took a hit because I was pretty much working full time at this point so i couldn't focus well in my studies but this paid off massively later.
I won't get too much into detail on this part because this path is going to vary wildly on what domain you specialize in. You could get a rough idea on where to begin from this website
DevOps Roadmap: Learn to become a DevOps Engineer or SRE
Learn to become a modern DevOps engineer by following the steps, skills, resources and guides listed in our community-driven roadmap.
Year 4: US Internship Bag the oayoff.
All the chaos culminated here. I applied to 100+ roles, flexing my freelance portfolio and DevOps expertise. Got rejected more times than I count. I legit felt heart broken after every rejection email but I kept applying and finally after months.Bagged a lucrative internship at a US tech firm in Seattle and California ($12k/month, flights/housing covered). My "I've built and deployed real-world applications for paying clients" story resonated way more than a perfect GPA. My boss told me he was impressed the second he saw my application. They couldn't fill the role for nearly 7 months and I came in at a critical time so they hired me immediately and I was given work from day 1. Now about the interview.
This wasn't your standard DSA-heavy loop. It was a practical assessment of my skills.
1. Online Assessment & HR Screen: The first filter was a standard online coding test with 1 LeetCode Mediums and one hard. It was one question on Hash maps and one on Dynamic Programming
followed by a quick call with a recruiter to discuss my resume and freelance experience. I crushed the DSA round the HR himself was surprised someone could solve it this quickly and told me about it on call.
2. Technical Shared Screen (1 Hour): This was a hybrid round. I solved one DSA problem (a tree traversal question) on a shared editor, and then spent 20 minutes answering questions about my MERN stack projects and my experience with Docker.
3. DevOps & System Design: This was a practical, scenario-based round. I don't remember the exact prompt but it was: "W Cl/CD pipeline for a full-stack application using GitHub Actions to deploy to AWS. I had to explain my choices for tools and architecture and all the problems that I might face. Also some technical questions. A few I remember are What is the benefit of using Terraform over manually creating resources in the AWS? Why would we use Kubernetes for this application instead of just Docker Compose on a single server
And after all these rounds I got selected and got an email congratulations. I legit was trying to hold back my tears when the email came. My parents called me and congratulated me. My father was proud of me and after all that grind it was done and then I flew to the United States and landed in Seattle. Was there for a few weeks before being moved to California. It was an amazing experience the i finally got to experience with cutting edge tech. The lectures that I got invited to were so interesting. I made a lot of friends also. My Jewish boss was nice af too. He literally mentored me like his own child. I made many powerful contacts and had a blast while still working as hard as possible to get the PPO. Countless sleepless nights. I even made threads talking about sleep problems due to being on call but my boss was empathetic to me
. He would let me take breaks for as long as possible and recognized all of my work and appreciated it within week of me working he assured me I will be given a PPO It is formal letter saying they the company will hire me after this time and he also told the Senior HR to fast track the H1B process and use all the connections he has got to get my H1B applications and stating I was too "valuable" to be let go
After that stint. I came back to India and was going to be filed for H1B but the company i worked at has off shored ak it's work so It remains to be seen if I will go back to the US or just WFH.
I am going back to my uni on 17th August
Finally wrapped up here. Heading back to finish my final year and earn my degree. My employer will submit my H-1B application next April, so now it's all in God's hand and depends on Mr. Trump decision now. whatever the universe has planned will be done. If the stars align I'll be back on this...
I also applied to bunch of other companies and got shortlisted and given job offers in the UK, US and India. Im still applying for jobs. Currently Product Manager jobs that is a bit different from the technical roles I'm used to.
View attachment 4177703View attachment 4177704
From the interviews that I've given. The main things you need to focus on would be these
Operating Systems (OS)- Process/Threads almost a guaranteed question around this topic. Also semaphore variables, mutex to prevent deadlocks and paging and segmentation problems these are the main topics that get asked
To learn OS you can use neetcode but the gold standard is the famous dinosaur book
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2. Computer Networks- OSI & TCP/IP Models- Important topics would be the OSI & TCP/IP Models. The Headers, DNS, HTTPS protocols all of it. Tbh i found my coursework material to suffice for most of the computer networks questions they ask in interviews. So I would just suggest doing some basic course in Udemy. They rarely ask deep questions about network unlike DSA
3. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)- In every single interview that I've sat for has asked OOPs concepts. Learning this is non negotiable. One sure shot question from one of the pillars Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism. Learn them thoroughly. This is going to be asked. And it's easy unlike DSA so learn it thoroughly. Do a Udemy course
Learn Object Oriented Programming | Object Oriented Programming Tutorials
Learn about object oriented programming from top-rated Udemy instructors. Whether you’re interested in object oriented programming, or OOP in Python, Java, or C, Udemy courses will help you achieve your goals.
4. System Design- This isn't as important and isn't as extensively asked as above. But it is the key to unlocking senior roles and interviews at MAANG-level companies less common for junior roles but still good to learn imo. I personally just watched a bunch of YouTube videos you can skip this concept tho atleast for now
Addressing the AI takeover-
I have to address this because the first comment to this post would be a Al doomer posts that the ChatGPT is coming for our jobs, GPT-5 will write entire codebases etc. You're looking at it all wrong. Al ironically made my life 10x easier.
In my 2nd year. My first website I coded it all from scratch and llms weren't advanced enough to do it but once LLMs could code. I started using and still use to write boilerplate code, unit tests, and simple functions for my MERN stacks. It probably cut my raw coding time by 30-40%. I still charged my clients the same project and. When I was deep into DevOps I used ChatGPT as a senior mentor and asked it to creat scripts and give me the basic framework to build it on and then tweak to make my life easier.
Figuring out what to write is 90% of software engineering. Not how to write. Coding is the easy part. The thing that takes time is debugging, reading documentation, communication with clients. AI is useful for front end work and boiler plate code but for the core logic part you still need a human unless you are okay with having inefficient one time use code with bugs and security vulnerabilities. Al can't talk to a client to figure out what they actually want, it can't design a complex system architecture from scratch, and it can't debug a weird, niche production issue at 3 AM That's still on you
The market doesn't pay you for the hours you spend typing. it pays you for the problems you solve and the value you deliver. Al helps you solve bigger problems, faster and people get paid because of what we call the knowledge gap. I know things that allow me to use AI in such a way that it can do all the work for me and correct the mistakes AI makes..this gap is what Devs exploit that is where the knowledge gap lies. That is what Devs take advantage off. Maybe once AI moves on from advanced pattern recognition and probability machine and can actually think with AGI these jobs will be gone but not now no..
That's it from me. Let me know if I missed something and if have any questions. Im going out now and will answer all your questions later. Thx
