Ugh! Another LEGENDARY title from me.
Wait, wait, wait. You don't know me, right?
Alas. I knew it. I'm not famous. But I have my intro ready. I still remember, on 9th Dec 2022, some seniors came out of nowhere and asked me for my intro, and then ended up giving theirs. Imagine that. A fresher taking intros from pre-final year guys.
Oh shoot. I still didn't introduce myself. I'm Rohan Sharma, a simple, ordinary human who spends his life inside one room. Remote job, you know. While writing this, I'm a DevRel Engineer at LLMWare. For most of the last year, I was also a part-time DevEx Engineer at Tessl. Yes, two jobs at a time, and somehow that became my normal.
Spoiler alert: this blog is going to be long. Bring some popcorn, you're about to watch four years of my life play out like a movie. Also keep a napkin nearby. Your eyes might go cloudy somewhere in between, with both sadness and happiness.
Roll... Camera... and Action!
Life before the new life started
Let's take the memory time machine and go to the past. My past.
I gave my board exams in 2018. I remember almost nothing about them. I don't even remember most of my school friends. You can guess my SUPER STRONG memory power by now. The only thing that stayed with me is a humiliation. I reached the exam center, walked up to the main gate, and the security guard stopped me and said, "kids' classes will resume after a month". Bro, WHAT! I was there to give my board exams. I was literally holding the admit card in my hand.
Anyway, let's flush that. Pretend you never read it. It still makes me cringe.
Right after boards, every Indian kid suddenly gets the power to choose the field they'll spend the rest of their life in. Uncle Ben said it best, "with great power comes great responsibility". For a 14 to 16 year old, that's a huge call, especially for boys, because at that age we all think we're extremely mature, mentally and physically. If you're from India, you know the pressure. It's never about what you want to do. It's about what everyone else is doing and what everyone else wants you to do. Parents usually ~force~ ask their kid to take science.
I got lucky there. As a 15 year old over-matured warm blooded kid, I picked science, with a twist. You normally choose one path, either engineering (Physics, Chemistry, Maths) or medical (Physics, Chemistry, Biology). I chose both. And that is exactly why the title of this blog says "medical aspirant". Read carefully, I'm writing tales here, not stories. The one thing I'm still proud of is that the decision was completely mine, and I stuck to it. My focus was mostly on medical.
Fast forward to 2020. I finished 12th. End of school life. That part went by fast. If you remember, 2020 was the COVID era. My last exam was on 17th March. I reached home, and within days every other stream's exam got cancelled and the official lockdown started on 22nd March.
I scored well in the boards. I did not score well in NEET, the medical entrance. And that continued till 2022. Yes, I took two years of drop just to become a doctor, and I still couldn't.
Alongside NEET, I was also sitting for JEE, the engineering entrance. 2022 was my last attempt. My parents told me to take admission in an engineering college, just to stay on the safe side. I denied it many times before they finally convinced me. Not because I hated the idea of being an engineer, but because I had spent years criticising my brothers for doing engineering. A proper moye moye moment for me.
And this is where the story begins.
The first step into the realm
I was a shy human, and shyness attracts evils you never invited. To bring some good fortune this time and kick the bad luck out, I decided to unlock a different version of myself.
9th Nov 2022. My first day at college. My first day as a student again.
I'm a home person. I never stepped out much back then, and honestly I still don't. So suddenly finding myself in a hall full of strangers felt uneasy. Every face was new to everyone else, and everyone was busy trying to turn a stranger into a familiar face.
In college, your first familiar face usually becomes your friend, the person you imagine ending the whole four years with. A beautiful imagination. If you're new and reading this, don't worry, you'll understand soon enough.
Anyway, let's get back to the point. I don't want to bore you with just my personal stuff.
The first year
"Good morning to all my brothers and my dear girlfriends."
Shocked? So was everyone else. That was the first line I ever spoke in that college, standing on a podium, in front of the entire batch. Pure chaos. Can you imagine the kind of profile that one line built for me? A blunt flirter. And that label followed me around for most of the year.
I never planned to make friends in college. By the end of December, I had one anyway. I had no idea back then that he'd end up being the person I'd spend the next four years with. He's irritating, and he talks about girls 24x7. Fun fact, neither of us ever managed to get a girlfriend. :p
I also ran into a lot of bad things in my first year because of my classmates. I got dragged into stuff I was never really part of. I don't want to recall it or write it down here, it will only create more disputes. Short version: I didn't like my classmates. Except that one friend.
Technically, this year was made of jealousy. I was jealous of almost everyone I met, because everyone felt miles ahead of me. I explored nearly every domain except app development, just trying to find the one place I could fit myself into. The domain I hated the most was sales and marketing. Remember this line, the irony lands later.
While exploring, I joined a lot of communities on Discord and Slack. Those places are quietly depressing for a newcomer. Everyone is talking about things that either make no sense to you or simply don't exist in your world yet. It got worse when I found people from my own age group and my own batch doing things I had never even heard of. Winning events, winning hackathons, landing internships, making money. At least that's what I assumed. The reality turned out to be very different. Most of them were empty on the inside.
By the end of the first year I had started hunting for opportunities, and I fell flat every single time. I knew nothing, and I was still walking into conversations and calls with people who were far ahead of me. I was basically making a joke out of myself. It was insulting, and I did it repeatedly.
Here's the honest part. I never learned things the right way. I didn't even learn from my mistakes. I chose the insulting way of learning, and I don't recommend it to anyone. Learn properly first, then walk in with confidence.
The second year
I'm breaking this one into two parts, the 3rd and the 4th semester, because they were two completely different lives. My second year started around September 2023 and ended in February 2025. Yes, that long. COVID had thrown the academic calendar off track, our university changed, and exams kept getting postponed. It became the longest year of my B.Tech, and also the turning point of my life.
3rd semester
We reached here fast, so let's slow down a bit.
As I said, I was losing respect everywhere, and that continued for a while. Then October arrived. Every October, a special thing happens for developers around the world called Hacktoberfest, a month long celebration of open-source where people contribute and make projects better. Since I was also a developer (c'mon, let me call myself one), I registered too.
Registering took me one minute. After that, I went completely blank. I had no idea what to do next or how to do it. So I did what everyone does in a tough moment. I opened YouTube.
By the way, did I mention that merging 4 PRs gets you a tee and some stickers? That was my only reason for participating. Every community I was part of was getting swags, tees, sippers, bottles, and I was sitting there jealous, wanting something of my own. Learning wasn't even on my mind. I didn't think I needed it.
So I searched "how to merge 4 PRs in Hacktoberfest easily". A very cheap video showed up. The guy said, "take any code, a sorting algorithm, a hello world, anything, in any language, and push it into any GitHub repository," followed by four or five steps. Guess what I did. I followed him exactly. No questions. No second opinion. No research.
The result? I was banned from Hacktoberfest in less than four days.
That one hurt. I actually felt it.
In the same month, another global event used to happen called HackSquad. Same open source spirit, but you compete in teams of five and the team with the most points wins. I joined when only 10 days were left. By then I knew what NOT to do. But I was still the bad guy. I made a hell lot of contributions, and almost all of them were typo and grammar fixes. They were valid, sure, but imagine collecting 3 or 4 points for correcting a single word. That's not the open source spirit.
We still finished 8th. The top 20 teams got swags, a lot of swags, and I got mine. And I was not happy at all.
The actual grind started right after that. I joined Quira, a platform that helps developers build and monetise their skills through quests. Some Nepali folks there pushed me to actually participate. So I did. I started shipping my own projects, and I earned $8. Eight dollars. It sounds like nothing, and it changed everything for me.
That wasn't technically my first earning though. I had started an article writing internship at GeeksforGeeks in October 2023. I never received that money, despite raising a pile of support tickets. So Quira became my first real payout, and I've been chasing that dollar pace ever since.
In April 2024, Quira offered me the Community Moderator role. The place where I was just a participant now had a seat for me. Unpaid at first, but it was mine.
August 2024 marked the end of the 3rd semester, and by then I had already collected a lot. A mountain of swags and some money, under 5K INR I think, I don't remember exactly. But for the first time, I could call myself an open source contributor without flinching.
Academically, this semester was dramatic. Endless exam postponements ate up a lot of time. I managed anyway, mostly because I never gave exams any priority. That's just who I am. I study the day before the exam. In my last three or four semesters, I studied for a maximum of two to four hours per paper, and walked into a few of them having studied nothing at all.
If you want to know how a dumbo became an open source contributor, read this blog.
4th semester
Life properly moved from here. I was late compared to others, but I had finally done something.
1st September is my birthday, and the 4th semester started on the same day. Good omen, I guess.
The first thing I did was stop comparing myself with others. That's it. That was the whole change. I still watched people, I still got motivated by them, but I stopped measuring myself against them. Comparison was the exact thing stopping me from doing better. It's okay to be behind. The better question I started asking was, why am I behind?
After that, I contributed more. Won a lot of bounties. Cared less about swags, though they kept arriving anyway. At one point I was working with around 10 companies, mostly for free. Not one of them ever complained about me or my work.
Then Quira signed me on a contract. I went from Community Moderator to Developer Advocate. And here comes the irony I asked you to remember. The guy who hated sales and marketing the most was now literally in developer relations. Life has a sense of humour.
That's also when I earned $750 for the first time in my life. I won't say I was happy. It felt just okay.
October 2024 came around, Hacktoberfest season again. I reached out to DigitalOcean, the organizers, and they unbanned me. I contributed heavily that year. No spam, no typo farming. In the same month, DevFest AI happened, run by the same people behind HackSquad. Our team finished 2nd this time.
January 2025 changed the shape of everything. I joined LLMWare as a DevRel Engineer while still moderating at Quira. On the side, I was preparing for GATE, and going to college every single day purely to touch that 75% attendance milestone. Nothing noble about it.
February came with the GATE exam in the first week, university exams right after, and then the thing I still don't have clean words for.
I ended my 4th semester in February 2025, earning over 1.5L a month. There's a story behind why I'm even mentioning that number. Back in my 2nd semester, one of my teachers challenged the whole class to land a package of 18L or more by graduation. I hit it in my second year. That's the only reason this number is here. I don't like talking about money, and from this point on in this blog, I won't mention it again.
One clarification though. I was never freelancing. I was properly employed, working with big-small companies.
If you want the full version of that year, here's my 2024 recap.
The third year
If the second year was the turning point, the third year was the one that quietly broke something in me while making me look successful from the outside.
It started in March 2025, and it started heavy. I was still carrying February with me. The cruel part was that we still shared the same classroom. Seeing someone every single day and walking past them like strangers is a very specific kind of pain, and nobody prepares you for it.
So I did what I always do. I buried myself in work. Being busy was the cheapest way to escape the matrix of overthinking. By the end of March, both my brothers left home for work, and for the first time the house went quiet. Not quiet for a day. Quiet for DAYS. Professionally I was on track. Personally, I was already falling behind.
Around April, llmware started picking up big momentum and doing work became my default state. Same month, I met the Founder & CEO of devEco. A few honest conversations later, I decided to work with them part-time too.
May is when it truly stacked up. college, llmware, quira, and devEco, all running in parallel. And with whatever time was left, I entered a DEV Challenge, the authorization one. Because apparently four things weren't enough.
Then came June, the biggest month of my life so far, and also the one I'd handle differently if I got another shot.
I pushed past every limit. 14 to 15 hours on non-college days, 8 to 9 on college days. I led the documentation for llmware's biggest product announcement, Model HQ. The work spanned two months but most of it landed in June. I won that DEV Challenge. I also wrote five blogs and scheduled them into July.
On paper, I was at my peak. In reality, at that exact peak, I forgot everything else. I barely ate, not because I couldn't, but because it never crossed my mind. And here's the thing nobody believes: there was zero pressure from either company. I was repeatedly told to slow down and rest. I didn't listen. That intensity was fully self-imposed.
And right in the middle of all that, the Founder & CEO of Quira told me the company was winding down. That one shook me. Quira was my first job, my first paycheck, the first place that made me feel like I belonged somewhere. Watching it end felt like watching a house I grew up in get emptied out.
July opened with university exams. I slowed down at work, not because of the exams, but because I was quietly losing interest, even while still showing up and delivering. Exams never scared me. Going to college every single day was the heavier part. As I said above, I'm a one nighter, three to four hours of study and then straight into the paper. Somehow I cleared everything with zero backlogs.
Quira officially shut down that month. I built and I gifted the Founder & CEO this, a small goodbye from everyone who grew up there. He loved it. That still means a lot to me.
Around the same time, one of my brothers resigned from his job. The food and the climate of that region had finally caught up with him.
August is when happiness started leaking back in. My brothers came home. One for good, to prepare for whatever was next, the other just for the holidays. The house had sound again.
I started working like a normal human being again, and for the first time in months, I had spare time. That's when a former DevRel from Quira reached out and asked if I could help out at his current company. He had taught me a lot. And I knew, clearly, that he didn't actually need help. He was finding a way to help me instead. I didn't say no.
That's how I joined Tessl as a part-time DevEx Engineer. Three companies again. Different work, harder work, and demanding in a way I hadn't experienced before.
September, my birthday month, again. I was born on the 1st. Fun fact, World War II also officially began that day. Strange coincidence, and I refuse to read into it. It was a good month. Tessl was tougher than anything I had done, mostly because I had never worked with so many people at once. Before this, my max was three or four. The Tessl team is stacked with names I used to only read about, and I genuinely loved being in that room. I even got to work with the Father of DevOps himself, and he appreciated my work. Ehehe. That one still lives rent free in my head.
October was the first month I didn't work at llmware at all. Things were shifting internally and we were all waiting. So I ended up with a break, and of course I didn't actually rest. I quietly started building something else, still under wraps at the time. I also shipped version 2.0 of Radhika, one of my own projects. The month was full of festivals, and for once, I celebrated them properly instead of watching them happen from behind a laptop.
November brought exams again, my 3rd university exam of the year, while llmware slowly resumed and tessl and devEco continued as usual. And somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted. Work started feeling boring. Not hard, not overwhelming. Boring. I stopped feeling much of anything. No excitement, no fear. Just a quiet numbness sitting in the background. My circle became the smallest it had ever been.
That's the honest summary of my third year. I earned a lot, learned a lot, met people I never thought I'd share a call with, and lost most of my ability to feel any of it while it was happening. Momentum has a cost, and I paid it in full that year.
If you want the unfiltered, month-by-month version of that year, it's all here in my 2025 recap.
The fourth year (the final one)
The shortest one. It started in December 2025 and ended in May 2026. 30th May was my last day at college as an official B.Tech student.
And this is where the thing you're reading this on was born. In the middle of all that chaos, I started building R's PlacePrep. My own thing, finally.
Honestly, I had plans for this year. I thought I'd finally slow down and actually live the college life at least once before it ended. I was so wrong. In the final year, everybody goes into hibernation. Nobody's hanging out. Everybody's grinding for placements or entrances, heads down, phones off. I couldn't live the year I had imagined because the year I saw was the exact opposite of it.
And the reason was obvious. Everyone wants to secure their career. Just because I started early doesn't mean everyone did. I'm not saying I'm special. I just forgot that the placement prep part still existed for the people around me, while I was already somewhere else.
Work-wise, this was the year I worked the most. Tessl had a lot going on, and so did LLMWare. Those were the only two companies I worked with in my final year. Today, I'm only with LLMWare.
If I have to conclude that part: I earned respect, trust, and value from every single employer I've had. I somehow ran into the nicest people on the planet, all at once, and I still don't know what I did to deserve that.
The last year moved in a blur of building, exams, exams, and more exams. I never got to say a proper goodbye to my friends. I ended up having 2 friends talking 24x7 about girls and more girls and hell lot of girls. And here's the truth. From 30th May till today, I haven't called them once, and I have no plans to.
Sometimes it grieves me that I never loved anyone. But I can't kill that much of my time chasing a few moments of happiness, so I keep myself away from those illusions. I know what you're thinking about me right now. That's fine. That's fair.
Being in love was never a part of my story. Now that college ends, I don't think I will even get it now. LOL.
Closing the tape
That was my story in super superrr superrrrrrr short.
Four years still feels like four days. I genuinely feel like I joined college yesterday, gave that ridiculous "good morning to all my brothers and my dear girlfriends" intro, and blinked.
If there's one thing I'd want you to take from this: I did everything in the wrong order. I chased swags before skills. I got banned before I learned. I compared myself into paralysis before I finally stopped. The moment things actually changed for me was the moment I stopped asking "why is he ahead of me" and started asking "why am I behind".
You don't need to be the smartest person in the room. You just need to stop being the one keeping score.
Before I close this, let me leave you with one exercise. It's the only useful thing I can hand over from these four years. It will help you figure out who you're and what your actually want. This is something a good will colleague learned from his senior colleague and he passed to me and now I'm passing this to you.
A fair warning first. This will make you feel like the villain of your own story for a while, and like the hero a few lines later. Both feelings are part of it. Just don't stop halfway. An unfinished version of this is worse than never starting it.
Use a pen and paper, a notes app, an unsent draft, a diary, whatever you're comfortable with. Nobody has to read it. Though if you ever want a second pair of eyes on it, send it to me. I'll happily read it and will have a chat with you.
Here's what you write. Walk your own timeline, honestly, one stop at a time.
- Go back to your childhood. What did you want to become? Pilot, engineer, actor, cricketer, whatever the answer was before the world had opinions about it.
- Now stand at class 10 and ask what you were supposed to have done by then.
- Do the same at class 12.
- Then just before college started.
- Then by the end of 1st year.
- By the end of 2nd year.
- By the end of 3rd year.
- By the end of 4th year.
- And the day college ended, what did you suddenly feel like doing?
- And right now, today, what is it that you actually need to do?
Once that timeline is on paper, pick a profession and interrogate it properly.
- Why this one? Why did you want it in the first place?
- Does it line up with any of the goals you just wrote down, or did it appear out of nowhere?
- Does it genuinely satisfy you, or does it only look good from outside?
- Is there a regret sitting somewhere in that answer? Write that down too.
Now sit with it and try to settle on your end goal. Then keep going.
- Write what you have already done, and what you are doing right now, to reach it. Even if the answer is nothing. Especially if it's nothing.
- Write why it matters to you.
- Write whether you're chasing it for yourself, for your family, or for both. Be honest here. This is the question most people lie to themselves about.
- And finally, ask the real one. Once you achieve it, will you actually find a piece of happiness in it?
If the answer to that last one is no, don't stop. Chain it forward. Something like: I want to achieve X, but X alone won't give me the happiness I've always wanted, so once I get there, I'll go after Y. Keep chaining until you hit the thing that would genuinely feel like enough. That last item on the chain is your real end goal. Everything before it is just a milestone.
That's the whole exercise. It takes many evening. It might change the next four years.
Didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to enjoy my college life. But what a journey it was.
Thank you for reading this far. I hope you get good health and good wealth, and hopefully in that order.
You know, life seems unfair. But it's really not. You just need fair eyes. Depression is a choice and not an option. Work for yourself, work for your family. This is life. Live it.
Oh btw, today is 1st Sept, and it's again my birthday. Won't you at least wish me a "happy belated birthday"?
Best,
Rohan Sharma
