By Arshad Azeez M — Founder & CEO of SidhiLynx, Electronics Engineering student at Anna University, Chennai
Let me tell you something that sounds a little crazy.
I started learning to code with no laptop, no computer, no system. I was a biology student in 12th standard — not computer science, not engineering. Biology. And I wanted to code.
So I did the only thing I could. I wrote code in my diary.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Pen and paper. I'd write Java programs in a notebook, then use OCR to extract the text, paste it into Programiz, and run it. That's how I learned. That's how I wrote my first loops, my first functions, my first programs.
Did it make sense? Not always. Did it work? Sometimes. Did I stop? No.
Why did I even start?
I just liked building things. That's honestly it. No grand plan, no startup vision, no money goal. I just saw software and thought — I want to make that.
After 12th, I picked up Java. Then Python. Then Dart. Then Flutter. One after another, self-taught, no formal training, just tutorials and trial and error and a lot of frustration.
Here's a formula I believe in deeply:
If you were given a job with no salary, no credit, no media visibility — and you had to do it for your entire life — would you still do it? If yes, that's your purpose.
For me the answer was always yes. I'd build software even if nobody ever knew my name. That's how I knew this was real.
The First Project — Travelling the World Without a Map
My first real project was a YouTube clone.
I suffered. A lot. I watched hours and hours of tutorials. I didn't understand half of what was happening. I hit walls constantly. But I kept going — and eventually, it worked. A full video platform. Built by me. From scratch.
That was the moment. That confidence boost when something you struggled with for weeks finally works — there's nothing like it.
But something interesting happened while building the comment section.
I was sitting there coding comments, replies, likes — and I thought: wait. Isn't this basically WhatsApp?
That one thought turned into my next project — a full end-to-end encrypted real-time chat application. Except this time I was also learning Firebase for the first time. No experience. No guide that matched exactly what I was building. Just me, searching, reading, trying, failing, trying again.
Travelling the world without a map. That's the only way I can describe it.
What I've Built Since Then
After those first two projects I couldn't stop. Here's what I've shipped independently:
- Encrypted Real-Time Chat System — E2E encrypted messaging with group support, built on Flutter + Firebase
- Video Streaming Platform — Full upload, playback, channels and subscriptions
- Audio Streaming Platform — Cross-platform audio with playlists and artist pages
- Instapresent — AI-powered face recognition attendance system using Flutter + Firebase + Flask
- Mikey — A voice-first AI chatbot powered by Mistral. You talk, it talks back. No typing.
- Lumetrix — An automated pipeline that scrapes JupyterLab, injects code, captures outputs, and generates a complete academic PDF with flowcharts and algorithms. Zero manual formatting.
- EngDraft / CADEVEL — An engineering education platform that generates step-by-step technical drafting explanations from natural language
All of this while studying. All of this self-taught. All of this because I like building.
In December 2025 I registered SidhiLynx as a company under India's MSME framework — a technology holding entity for all these platforms. I'm 18. I'm in my first year of Electronics Engineering at Anna University, Chennai.
The Thing Nobody Tells You
You don't need the perfect setup to start. I didn't have a laptop. I wrote code in a diary.
You don't need a computer science degree. I studied biology.
You don't need to know the full path before you start. I built a comment section and accidentally invented my next project.
The only thing you need is to genuinely like what you're building. Because the nights when nothing works, when you've been staring at the same bug for 4 hours, when you feel like you have no idea what you're doing — the only thing that keeps you going is that you actually want to be there.
Ask yourself that question. The no salary, no credit, no visibility one.
If the answer is yes — stop waiting. Open a tab. Start building.
The map will appear as you go.
Arshad Azeez M is the founder and CEO of SidhiLynx, a technology company based in Chennai, India. He is currently pursuing B.Tech Electronics Engineering (VLSI Design and Technology) at Anna University. You can find him at ceo.sidhi.xyz
Tags: beginners career webdev flutter
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