My passion for programming started at the age of eleven in late 2016. My mom's midwife, who delivered my little brother, introduced me to Khan Academy.

After having completed most of the programming courses on Khan, I moved on to FreeCodeCamp. Through FreeCodeCamp, I gained fluency in the frontend HTML/CSS/JS stack.

I made a large mistake of being tied to Khan Academy for a time span of about three years. In that time span, I learned how to make fullstack websites with python flask on Codecademy, discovered Replit and hosted some projects there, and joined a few discord servers.

Discord completely changed the way I saw programming, and how communities were structured. I was able to communicate in realtime with many other programmers and learn how to code so much faster. On the other side of discord, however, I did some really foolish stuff, got my account nuked, and hung around people I really shouldn't have.

Shortly after the discord incident, I stood back up again and started to learn more about programming and participated in some hackathons.

In the November of 2021, Replit announced their Kajam competition, which I was super hyped up about. Participating in the competition really got me close to the community, and that's when I finally cut the rope on Khan and moved over to Replit.

Shortly after Kajam, I decided that I wanted to work at Replit, so I applied for an internship. I flunked the interview but wasn't about to stop there.

For the next few months, I drilled and raced solving programming algorithms as fast as I could, got really close to the Replit community, and became site moderator on Replit. I also learned Next.js and switched my html/css/js/node/mongo stack to Next.js

I created a lot more content with Next.js, started building moderation tools, and changed the way moderation worked at Replit. I did some contract work for Replit's moderation team for a bit.

Finally, I decided to try to apply to work at Replit again. I had racked up a large amount of knowledge in the past year and was ready to try again.

I wrote an email to Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit and sent the HTML email to him with Node.js. I almost got in, but the engineering team didn't have the time or capacity to mentor me. My manager posted in discord that he needed a support engineer, and I jumped into that entry point. After going through all the interviews, I got hired.

Now I'm here continuing to grow and learn in Replit. I'm currently trying to lean into Product Engineering and DevRel more outside of Support Engineering.