16-year-old me just loved to code.
There was no product strategy. No personal brand. Definitely no five-year plan. I just liked the tiny drama of submitting a solution, watching the tests run, and either getting that beautiful green accepted message or being humbled by one edge case I had completely ignored.
Competitive programming taught me a very specific kind of patience: stay with the problem long enough for its shape to change. That still shows up when I debug an XR interaction or build an AI workflow. The tools are fancier now, but emotionally it is still me versus the one test case that refuses to cooperate lol.
I spent way too many hours on HackerEarth solving problems, grinding Code Arena, and genuinely believing coding battles were cooler than PUBG. (I even made a Linkedin post saying exactly that 😂)
I logged back into that account for the first time in four years... ...and somehow it's still Top 1% in Algorithms and Top 2% in Basic Programming. That genuinely made me smile.
Not because of the ranking, but because it reminded me where all of this started. Before Al. Before XR. Before research papers, hackathons, and building products people actually use.
It was just me, a laptop, and the satisfaction of finally getting an accepted solution after staring at a problem for way too long.
Looking back, I think that curiosity shaped everything I've built since.
Maybe it's time to dust off this account again. (and yes... the Black Widow profile picture is staying. huge marvel fan then, huge marvel fan now.)
If you're curious, here's the profile: https://lnkd.in/gz8hjXs6
What I remember most is the shift from an idea in my head to something another person could actually touch. Shipping makes the questions sharper, the feedback more honest, and the next version much easier to imagine.