How It All Started

You know how in some places students need expensive guidebooks to pass exams? Back in elementary school, most families in my village could not afford them. Almost everyone had a phone.

So I started tinkering. Without Wi-Fi, learning anything meant downloading tutorials, tools, and whatever I could find on mobile data. I played with After Effects, tried Photoshop, and explored different software.

While experimenting, an idea appeared: build a simple Android app with free educational content. Stories, letters, and paragraphs that could help students study. I had no clue how to code, and downloading Android Studio without Wi-Fi was a mission of its own.

Try walking half a mile to buy mobile data with saved money, watching a download reach 50%, and then losing it to a storage-full error. Downloads corrupted, installers failed, signals dropped. Every megabyte mattered. Android Studio took 12 hours of hoping nothing would break.

My computer had only 1GB of RAM, so every compilation tested my patience. I restarted it more times than I can count. Eventually I upgraded the RAM and learned the hard disk was too small to handle the extra memory well. Disk thrashing became the soundtrack of my coding sessions.

I had no mentors or YouTube tutorials. When I got stuck, I left it and came back later. It was isolating, but I kept going.

After months of trial and error, sleepless nights, and a progress bar that seemed frozen in time, I finally held a working APK. I could not afford the $25 Play Store fee at first, but later I managed. In 2018, I published it. It had only a few users, but it was real and it worked.

That is where it all began. Not with a goal of becoming a software engineer, but with a desire to solve a problem I saw around me. I am still learning and still building.