From Solving DSA Problems to Contributing to Open Source
When I started my Computer Science journey, I had no grand plan.
Like many students, I began with Data Structures and Algorithms. My days revolved around solving problems, learning patterns, participating in contests, and trying to improve a little every week. What started as curiosity slowly turned into consistency.
Over time, I solved 2000+ problems across different platforms, became a Knight on LeetCode, and reached Specialist on Codeforces. More importantly, those countless hours taught me how to think systematically about problems rather than just write code.
But after spending a significant amount of time in competitive programming, I started wondering how software is built in the real world.
That’s when I discovered open source.
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My first contributions were small. Reading unfamiliar codebases, understanding project structures, setting up development environments, and fixing issues felt intimidating. However, every merged pull request boosted my confidence and taught me something new.
Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to projects such as OpenRewrite, Apache RocketMQ, Spring Kafka, SpotBugs, Security Shepherd, cBioPortal, and OpenSearch.
Alongside open source, I also started building projects. From an AI-powered legal search engine to backend systems and productivity tools, each project helped me understand system design, scalability, and software engineering practices more deeply.
Today, my primary interests lie in backend engineering, distributed systems, cloud-native technologies, and open source development. There is still a lot to learn, but that’s what makes the journey exciting.
This blog will be a place where I occasionally share lessons, challenges, project breakdowns, open-source experiences, and things I learn while exploring software engineering.
I’m still learning, still building, and still figuring things out.
And honestly, that’s the fun part.
Thanks for reading.
