How a Potato PC and Friends Made Me a Developer.

My chill story of becoming a programmer, featuring a almost dying laptop and some epic friends.

So, the year was 2016. I was in 6th standard, learning the basics of HTML because it was part of the course.

One day in the computer lab, this classmate—who I kinda despised for some dumb kid reason—starts showing off an HTML page he made. It wasn’t anything wild, just a simple page, but it was way cooler than what we’d been taught.
I wasn’t just curious—I was jealous. I had to beat him at his own game. So, I went home, Googled like crazy, and stumbled on W3Schools. There, I found the <input> tag, I tested it on my dad’s laptop — and it seemed like sorcery!!

That petty rivalry lit a fire (Totally not anime style). We both kept pushing to outdo each other, and somewhere along the way, I forgot why I even disliked him. We ended up friends—actually, he’s one of my best buds now. He got me hooked on batch scripts (think Matrix-style effects), and by the end of 6th standard, I was pretty decent with CSS. We’d mess around making dummy homepages, and it was honestly a blast.

That spark of curiosity led me to Python next. I will be honest, I hated loops at first—they just didn’t click. Frustrated, I dropped Python and stuck to HTML and CSS for a bit. But a few months later, I gave it another shot, and suddenly, loops made sense. They were actually cool! That old rivalry also nudged me toward GUI stuff like Tkinter and PyQt5. I built small projects, like a beat player I called Beatox—basically a laggy drum pad for loops. It wasn’t perfect, but I was proud.

Fast forward to 9th standard: I was decent with Python and itching to build something big—partly to make my friend jealous again. Around then, I got into anime. My first was Sword Art Online (yea it’s not that good I get it but it was to the me back then), and it blew my mind—virtual reality games felt like the ultimate dream. Then COVID hit, and I was stuck at home, bored. Among Us blew up, my friends wanted to voice chat, and I joined Discord. A few months in, I found this RPG bot based on Demon Slayer and got obsessed grinding it. I even tinkered with Selenium to auto-farm a little. That’s when I discovered Discord.py and decided to make my own bot inspired by Black Clover, an anime I loved.

Building that bot was brutal. Big lesson learned: skip tutorials and read the docs. Long story short I spent two weeks on a basic bot from a YouTube video, only to realize the code was outdated. Rewrote it all with help from the Discord.py community and docs—shoutout to them, they’re awesome. I hooked up a MongoDB database (my first go at that; SQL might’ve been smarter for RPG bots, though). I also made a private music bot for the support server. The RPG bot eventually hit 350 servers, which was insane. I had to shut it down later because VPS costs were no joke, but those all-nighters fixing bugs and pushing updates? Pure adrenaline.

Now, let’s talk about my laptop—a total potato. Intel i3 2nd gen, 2GB RAM, 300GB HDD. On which my smart pants slapped Windows 10, and there was no turning back. It lagged hard, especially during online classes. In 2022, I upgraded to 4GB RAM and a 120GB SSD, and it was like night and day. Finally, I could run Node.js without it crashing—time for web development! A Discord friend was into it, and it looked dope. Before the upgrade, Node.js would’ve made my laptop weep.

I’m a weeb, so I found this GitHub repo for an anime streaming site using scraping APIs. I forked it, messed with it, and Googled everything I didn’t get (with ai this step is much faster now). Tweaked the UI to my taste and learned Next.js along the way. It took months, but it paid off. I grabbed a domain from the GitHub Education Pack for my portfolio and used a subdomain for the streaming site. (No worries it won’t work now.)

In 2023-24, I built more websites: one for my story drafts, a TikTok-style site for anime pics, a customizable new tab page and a few others. This year, I dipped into extension development with WXT and made Monochromate—a simple tool that grayscales webpages to cut screen time. It was a fun way to learn how extensions work.

Right now, I really want to dive into app development, but my laptop’s holding me back. Compiling the Flutter dev environment took 7 minutes, and Android Studio might actually kill it (There’s also React Native but I want to learn something new). I’m saving up for an upgrade. This potato laptop—13 years old and something that was built to last—turned me into a developer. I’m grateful for it; most of my classmates didn’t even have one, and it let me explore stuff they couldn’t. Huge thanks to my friend, too—they kept my curiosity alive and pushed me into new territory every step of the way. I’m also stoked about AI and agents, but one thing at a time.

I would love to read your stories in the comments and if you want to fuel my next upgrade!!