If you had told sixteen-year-old me, hunched over a second-hand laptop in Kolkata, that one day I'd be building AI agents and contributing to open-source projects that people actually use, I probably would have laughed while secretly hoping you were right.
But here I am, still hunched over a laptop, though the coffee's gotten better, and somehow living that reality.
Roots and Restlessness
I'm Aniruddha, though the internet knows me as aniruddhaadak80 on GitHub or just that guy who won't stop writing about Next.js on DEV.to. I grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal, where the monsoons are heavy, and the street food is unbeatable.
There's something about this city, the way it mixes chaos with creativity, that I think prepared me for debugging. You learn to find patterns in noise here.
I wasn't one of those kids who started coding at age five. My journey began more messily. Around 2020, when I was finishing up my Class X, I got curious about how websites worked. Not the glamorous "I want to change the world" kind of curiosity, more like "how does this button know I clicked it?" That question led me down a rabbit hole I'm still falling through.
The BBIT Years
In 2022, I enrolled at Budge Budge Institute of Technology (BBIT) for my B.Tech in Computer Science, and honestly? Those first few semesters were humbling. I walked in thinking I knew things, and promptly had my mind expanded (and occasionally fried) by actual computer science theory. But BBIT gave me something more valuable than grades. It gave me my tribe. People who stay up until 3 AM arguing about the best state management library or whether Tailwind CSS is cheating (it's not, by the way, it's just efficient).
College is where I realized I'm a polyglot at heart, not with spoken languages, though I manage Hindi, English, and Bengali just fine, but with programming languages. Python for its elegance when I'm training models. JavaScript because it's the wild west of the web. TypeScript because sanity matters. C++ when I need to feel close to the metal. I don't believe in "one language to rule them all." Each is a different lens for viewing a problem.
Building in Public
Somewhere around my second year, I got tired of tutorial hell. You know that place, you've watched fifty videos on React, built three to-do apps, and somehow still don't feel like a "real" developer. So I decided to build things that scared me.
SkillSphere was probably my first "real" project, a unified platform with ten different mini-apps focused on well-being and productivity. It wasn't perfect (is anything ever?), but it taught me that users care more about solving their problem than your tech stack.
Then came VocalScribe, which combined my fascination with AI and practical utility. Using AssemblyAI's LEMUR API and Google's Gemini, I built something that could transcribe speech in real-time. There's a special kind of magic in watching spoken words turn into text on a screen, like capturing lightning in a bottle.
TradeView taught me about real-time data and WebSockets, while MarketPulse AI pushed me into the world of financial sentiment analysis. Each project was a response to a question I had: "What if I could...?" That's still my primary motivation. Not money, not clout, just pure, childlike curiosity.
The Hacktoberfest Obsession
2024 was the year I fell in love with open source. I know people toss around "open source" like a buzzword, but for me, it became something spiritual. Contributing 238 pull requests during Hacktoberfest wasn't about the badges (though those Holopin badges do look shiny on my profile). It was about realizing that code is a conversation.
When you submit a PR to a project maintained by someone in another timezone, someone you've never met, and they merge it, you're collaborating without borders. That Pakistani developer fixing your documentation typo, that Brazilian woman refactoring your logic, they're your teammates. Open source taught me that software is a team sport played by individuals sitting alone in rooms. Paradoxical, but beautiful.
Why I Write
If code is how I solve problems, writing is how I process them. I started publishing on DEV.to and Medium because I was tired of realizing I'd wasted three hours on a bug that someone else had already documented better. The tech community gave me so much, free tutorials, free tools, free advice, that writing felt like paying rent on my education.
There's a special satisfaction in taking a complex concept, say, implementing WebSockets in a React app, and breaking it down so a first-year student doesn't have to cry into their keyboard like I did. Teaching is learning twice, and explaining something forces you to understand it deeply.
The AI Chapter
Lately, I've been exploring what I call "agentic AI", not just using AI tools, but building AI agents that can actually do things. SupplyGuard AI, which monitors global supply chains for disruption risks, and LingoLens, which handles real-time audio processing and translation, represent where I'm headed.
I don't want to just use AI; I want to understand it, bend it, build ethically with it. We're at an inflection point where the code we write can think, and that's both terrifying and exhilarating. I spend a lot of time thinking about the ethical implications, how do we build these systems responsibly? I don't have all the answers, but I'm committed to asking the questions.
The Human Behind the Commits
Here's what my GitHub stats won't tell you: I still get imposter syndrome. Badly. There are days I look at someone's clean, elegant code and feel like a fraud who just got lucky. Days when WebSockets refuse to connect and I consider becoming a farmer.
But then there are the good days. When a project finally compiles after three days of debugging. When someone on the internet says "your article saved my project." When I realize that the confused 2021 version of me would be proud of who I've become in 2025.
I'm not just a collection of technologies, though my resume might suggest I'm 95% JavaScript, 90% React, and 85% TypeScript. I'm someone who believes coding is a craft, like pottery or carpentry. It requires patience, sweaty effort, and occasional cursing. But when you make something that works, that actually helps someone, it's worth every late night.
What's Next?
I'm graduating soon (B.Tech 2026 is approaching fast), and the future feels wide open. I'm looking at roles that let me bridge full-stack development with AI engineering, but honestly? I just want to keep learning. There are so many technologies I haven't touched yet, so many problems I haven't tried to solve.
I want to mentor more. I want to contribute to bigger open-source projects. I want to build something that makes someone's day a little easier. And I want to stay humble enough to remember that every expert was once a beginner who refused to quit.
Let's Connect
If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story. I'm always open to collaborating on interesting projects, discussing the latest in web dev or AI, or just talking about the best street food in Kolkata (seriously, try the phuchka near Gariahat).
You can find me coding into the night on GitHub, sharing hot takes on DEV.to, or just shoot me an email at aniruddhaadak80@gmail.com. If you favorite programming language is also your favorite tool for solving real problems, we'll probably get along just fine.
Keep building, keep questioning, and remember: every expert was once a beginner who didn't give up.
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