I’m Sankalp Mukim. I live in Delhi, where I design the future.
My beginning.
I’ve loved making things for as long as I can remember, and wrote my first program when I was around 12 years old. Worked on QBasic in my school's computer lab. The joy of compiling and running a program I wrote myself was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
At 15, I was working on robotics projects after school hours, I represented my school in international robotics competitions in Singapore. Writing programs using drag and drop editors that compiled to C and ran perfectly on microcontrollers gave me boundless joy.
My inspiration.
Some time ago, when I published a React Native app to the Play Store, I got a huge rush, so much happiness when it finally went live. I got to introspect over my journey and realise my true motivation into becoming a software engineer.
The app was a very simple program that stored user's WiFi credentials locally and helped them login to Campus WiFi with one tap. About 2 years before that, I had published my first website to Heroku. The most important point was that something I made was able to be used by the outside world.
It was a simple app that converted students' timetables to Google Calendars. I made this project because I wanted to use Google Calendar for my timetable and thought this process doesn't need to be manual! I was so excited when I saw the logs on Heroku of other people using the project. Every single count of person who used it made a huge difference to my life.
My journey.
I'm currently a 3rd year student at Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu. I started to seriously code only in my 1st year of college.
As college taught us the basics of programming in Python, I worked in python scripts majority of the time. As Django was the popular major choice for full stack web development, and I wanted to build complete projects, I started learning Django. I made several projects in Django, and I was able to get a decent grasp of the framework.
While working on a particular Django full stack project, I was having to learn and write a lot of DOM logic in javascript for interactivity. I found and did several things that Javascript was great for! As I polished my javascript skills, I started learning React.
After doing their official tutorial, I made one of my favorite projects till date, A Number Puzzle Game in React. I made the first version in about a week, then over time, kept adding features to it. I was able to learn a lot about React, and I was able to make a project that I was proud of. Over time, I added responsiveness, dark mode, made it installable using PWAs, and added a leaderboard using Firebase. I learnt how to write advanced performant React by improving this project, understanding and reducing redundant re renders.
For some time, I kept doing Frontend, learnt using NextJS, and made a few projects. I was able to learn a lot about React and NextJS, but I was missing out on the backend. I wanted to learn how to make a full stack project, and I wanted to learn how to make a backend that was scalable, secure and reliable. So I slowly shifted into Typescript and backend.
As of today, Typescript is my primary go to language but I am also learning Go in my free time. Since the beginning I have enjoyed being full stack to be able to make complete projects by myself. So now, I can make a web or an app frontend. Make a backend with both SQL or a NoSQL database. I can deploy the project on a cloud platform and make it scale with confidence. And I am looking for opportunities that will allow me to continue to learn and grow.