Grandma’s Xbox

My parents always saw electronic devices as the gateway to a ruined attention span. With them largely absent from my childhood, I developed an intense ability to focus on any pursuit to completion.

Ironically, my primary interests have always centered around electronic devices.

My love for anything on a screen started pretty early. My grandmother had a computer at her place and an Xbox. Contrasted to my Faraday cage of a home, this was heaven. Any day I could, I would spend it sitting at her computer fighting pixel thugs and monsters until my parents dragged me back home in the evening.

I got so comfortable with computers though playing games, that learning the rest occurred naturally. I started tinkering with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – interesting little icons on the desktop - and accidentally mastered them.

In fourth grade, my father, tired of me shuttling between Grandma’s house and ours, finally got me my own computer (still a no on the WiFi, of course).

Whatever. I was still stoked.

I later bought a book at a fair called Habluder Jonno Programming, which translates to Programming for Idiots (it spoke to me). When I got back home, I ran my first code ever on my browser’s console:

console.log("Hello, World!");

Thus began my journey in the world of programming languages.

Within two years, I mastered multiple programming languages and placed in the Top 10 of the National High School Programming Contest. During that time, I was on a real high about competitive programming. I remember hours of frustration, coffee, leaving my seat in impatience and returning even faster the second a solution came to me. Win or lose, it was addictive in its own strange way and nothing else could match the thrill.

Until one time, I developed a bot to help debaters with scheduling, timekeeping, and other tasks. I am debater myself and the bot was an addition to the Tabbycat Debating Software that we all used in tournaments.

A few months later, the bot went offline because I couldn’t keep up with the hosting costs. That’s when the messages started flooding in, people from all across the globe, asking me what had happened, telling me how much they had relied on it.

I felt something bloom within my chest as I read. My tiny creation had made its way all the way to America, China and Japan – places I’d never been - and integrated itself into someone else’s daily routine. In a strange way, I had travelled with it. Alone in my room, and yet connected to so many others, I couldn’t help but smile.

It struck me that moment how important it was to me that my work makes an impact. I started writing guides and making tutorials on programming for beginners on my YouTube Channel soon after winning the developer article contest at Tech Diary Dev Article Contest 2021. It’s strange how I shrink so many months of effort and tribulations into such small lines. They barely hint at years of obstacles, frustration, and hours of wishing someone else had the answers.

In a way, I write about what I learn because I would have liked someone else to have written those things for me back when I had no one.

Now as I sit in my room typing this essay, I glance at my latest creation and remember rushing to my cousin’s house to download courses on a pen drive. I imagine telling my 10-year-old self that I’d made a voice-controlled drone that autonomously delivers food. He stares at me wide-eyed and asks what “autonomous” means (because that word doesn’t join his vernacular for another three years).

And to think, he might never have learned if not for Grandma’s Xbox and an old PC.