Hey, My name is Kanika Gola, I am a second-year student pursuing BTech.I am not here to guide you, inspire you all or make you feel bored 😂. This is my small journey in which I had some major ups and downs and I thought It would be nice to share this with all of you.

Note: It doesn't matter what is the tier of your college, If you have the skills and the passion, You got it💪

I am not here to boast about my achievements🙂, I am listing all these just to give you people some information about Who I am, What I Do and stuff!

• I am a Full Stack Web Developer💻, Open-Source Lover💪 and a DevOps Learner❤️
• I am a C4GT 2022 contributor working on the project YAUS. I am one of the 13 contributors i.e the first cohort of CodeForGovTech2022🥳
• I have won the RedBricks Hackathon (Health Care Track) organised by Ashoka University along with my team with gift prizes worth of Rs. 1.2 Lakh🥳
• I am an ambassador at AngelHack👀
• I have also won the Ideathon( Health Care Track) named Rasverse:ideafind+ along with my team organised by VIT Vellore🥳
• I am a student expert at Postman🚀

So, enough achievements now let me take you along on my small tech journey✈️

First Year

Ist Semester

• Well, I am not proud to say this but I did nothing in my First Semester, which I regret somehow🥲
• Just to give you a little insight, I am in a 4-5 (I don't know🥲) tier college😅

IInd Semester

• As my semester was online, I wanted to look around some of the tech stacks and the kind of designations a software engineer could get.
• So after doing some research, I got interested in Web development and started watching some youtube tutorials.
• Starting with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I directly dived into React and till today it's my favourite library to work with.
• Made some personal projects to get hold of the tech stack.

By the end of IInd semester, I knew front-end development and React became my go-to library.

Second Year

IIIrd Semester

• IIIrd semester is the most important semester in my whole tech journey till now.
• This was the time when I gave my first online hackathon, and it was a complete failure as we were not even able to complete the project😅
• But this started my never-ending relationship with hackathons.
• I was lucky enough to have friends who were of the same mentality as me and were very much interested in the development and non-academic stuff🥰
• We used to participate in every possible hackathon and work on projects for those hackathons.
• I believe that the major growth of my development skills was from working on those projects.
• Earlier I just knew frontend development but then while working on those projects I learnt backend development too.
• I also started with Data Structures and Algorithms and really enjoyed solving questions on leetcode, but somehow got a little drifted form it.
• But I will surely resume it soon🤝
• And how can I forget, I used to hear a lot about Open-Source, Remote Work and DevOps so I tried gathering some more knowledge regarding it.
• And then started my open-source contributions with a CNCF project called Datree, wrote some for them but unfortunately my PR didn't got merge.
• But I didn't lose hope and started finding more projects like Helm, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Electron...
• Till now I have contributed to many open-source projects including GSSOC 2022 and would continue to do so🚀

GitHub: https://github.com/Kanika637

• In January 2022, I and my teammate managed to come into the top 50 teams of DotSlash 5.O hackathon and experienced the happiness of getting a swag kit for the first time🥳

I also tried for some internships and completed two or three assignments for some companies but I think life had some other plans for me and didn't get any of them.

I also started being part of some communities and they were really the live saviours. Whenever I used to get any errors, I would straightly go to the discord servers of one of them and people were so supportive and helpful there.

IVth Semester

• It's the 4th semester now, and it's high time that I want to showcase my development skills and want to make some money out of it.

• We usually don't talk about our failures, and in my case, I had a lot of them:

• Applied for an internship, completed the first round, and then gave the second round which was a 1hr long DSA round( which actually went very well🙂) the funny catch here is that I did receive a confirmation call from them but then, I didn't get it.

• Applied for MLH Fellowship, the application got shortlisted, gave the first level of interview (which again went very well😂) but then didn't go further in it.

• Applied for GSOC 2022, made a proposal and then got satisfied with a (personalized I guess🥺) cheerful mail🥲

But one thing that I always used to hear from my friend was, he used to say "Things will eventually fall into your favour, Just be patient and keep working hard kanika😌✌️" and he meant it.

After all these failures I wanted to give myself a fresh start 💪

• This was the time when I wanted to learn something new in development and also wanted to try ML and Python.

• So we gathered a little team of three people and started working on our project which we are really proud of "Your Personal AI Yoga Trainer"❤️

• My first (offline) hackathon was Innohacks organised by KIET, and I just fell in love with the whole atmosphere of a hackathon.

• You meet so many similar-minded people who are continuously working on making new features, transforming their ideas into real things is so fascinating😁
• We also managed to come into top 30 teams of Innohacks🤝
• We were happy that the mentors and people around were liking our idea and they were appreciating us.
• We didn't win the hackathon but we learned a lot, enjoyed a lot, incorporated the suggestions given by the mentors and went home with slight satisfaction.
• The next and the most memorable hackathon of my life would be the Redbricks hackathon organised by Ashoka University. WE WON IT !!!🥳'

• That was another level of happiness when we heard the winning team's name, GreedyDevs💪❤️

• Our sleepless nights working on the project finally paid off.

• We then also won the Rasverse ideafind+ (Health Track) hackathon organised by VIT Vellore🥳

• After this, I applied for CodeForGovTech, a summer coding program similar to GSOC.
• It had some projects, so I chose the project on which I wanted to work on and made a proposal for it.
• That was again a whole cycle of reviews, editing, enhancements and so on...
• But finally guess what👀, I got selected as one of the 13 contributors i.e in the first cohort of C4GT 2022.
• It feels so good when you become financially independent🥺

Another great thing that happened was, that we gave our first interview as the winning team on the youtube channel of Kunal Kulshrestha❤️

Here, show some love:https://youtu.be/f97JjpIQUvc❤️

Things I learned🚀

1. I truly believe that open-source is the one thing which gave me so many opportunities and also helped me grow my technical skills.

2. Being active on tech Twitter, makes you feel that you are gathered with so many people who have the same mindsets as yours, who are there to help you, guide you and with whom you can share your achievements

3. Don't be scared of your failures, these are not permanent, they are just making you strong👍

4. Just keep on trying new tech stacks until you find one, which is the best for you👀