Ego of a Developer: When Confidence Meets Reality

Everyone knows what happens when ego meets reality. This is my story, not of glory, but of humility, growth, and the unexpected path that led me from the sidelines to the winners circle.

The Embarrassment That Changed Everything

Fresh out of SSC, I moved to a new city for my computer engineering diploma. Everything was nice. The first year went by smoothly, but I wasn't ready. Just basic HTML and CSS knowledge. That was it.

By second year, I was practicing coding, but let's be honest, I wasn't good. Not even close.

Then came the news. There was a hackathon happening in Pune. Registrations were open. Everyone from my class was going. Everyone was excited and getting ready to participate. Everyone except me.

I was embarrassed. Really embarrassed. Not because I didn't want to go. Because I couldn't. I didn't have the skills. I barely understood the basics of programming. While my classmates geared up for competition, I sat there watching the opportunity pass me by. That was my reality check. And it hit hard.

The Six Weeks That Changed Everything

After the semester ended, something came up. An internship training program. Six weeks of it. That's when I decided to change everything. I started from absolute basics and just kept going, bit by bit.

By the time third year started, something remarkable had happened. I'd taught myself React. No YouTube tutorials. My Discord friend explained the basics to me. How to create components. How hooks work. I took it from there. Someone else introduced me to Vite. I started learning Node.js at the same time. Before I knew it, I was building full MERN applications.

No showoff. No pretense. Just consistent learning and practice.

The Final Year Project

Then college started and there was this thing. A final year project. One year to build something. It would span the last three semesters of my diploma exams.

We were assigned mentors. But the project idea wasn't finalized. Sessions kept happening. We still didn't know what we were actually building. Just panic and confusion everywhere.

Then we heard something. The previous year, someone made something with OpenCV. That sparked an idea. I went home and researched OpenCV obsessively. I made some scripts. Tested them one by one. It was chaotic managing everything locally, so I built a simple web interface and started listing them there. I ran them through the interface and it worked. That small win got me excited. We could do something with this.

So that's what we did. We built a platform around it. We ideated features. Added chatrooms. Curated resources. Created a community driven space for the entire computer vision domain. Users started contributing. They were submitting their OpenCV creations to our platform. We started participating in competitions.

We called it Perceptai.

The Sniffer Project

But while all this was happening, I had another project idea brewing in my mind. A personal obsession. Something I'd been researching. A framework to detect deepfake content 100x faster than the traditional approach.

I called it Sniffer.

I decided to participate with this idea in a paper presentation competition. I'd never done anything like this before in my life. I got a teammate. We got to work. I was stressed, working late into the nights making that paper. Somehow, we finished it. Somehow, we made the presentation. We showed up tensed and unprepared, but confident. We believed we had something worth sharing.

And we won.

That was my first experience of winning a competition. It felt like validation for all the self-doubt I'd managed to push through.

The State-Level Competition

After that first win, we didn't stop. We iterated on Perceptai constantly. We kept improving it, refining it, pushing it further. We started presenting it as a SaaS product and we were winning everywhere we participated.

Then came the biggest opportunity. A state level project competition at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology. Right here in Maharashtra. This was massive.

We applied. But here's the thing. There was only one software project slot available per college. And there were many participants from our college. Everyone was saying the same thing. We didn't have a chance.

We got selected anyway.

We went there somewhat prepared but deeply underconfident. It was Ramadan that day. Everyone around us had hope. Our guide had hope. We didn't. We were nervous.

We got our stall set up. Did the orientation. Started setting up our laptops. Then a power cut happened. Our batteries were low. My laptop died. The project wasn't even set up when the jury started coming around.

We did what we could with what we had. We presented what we managed to set up. During the Sniffer demo, one feature didn't work as expected because of port forwarding issues with Perceptai. But the deepfake detection demo impressed them enough.

We went to the auditorium at 5 PM to wait for the results. We sat together, comforting each other. Our presentation wasn't perfect. Our demo had glitches. Hope felt far away.

Then the prize distribution ceremony started. One by one, prizes were being announced. Second prize went to someone. First prize went to someone else. We thought that was it. But wait, that was for the hardware category.

Then came the software category. There were competitors from all across Maharashtra. Professional quality projects. Everything was polished.

"Second prize goes to Percept-Ai"

I'm typing this and getting goosebumps all over again. We won. We won our first state-level competition.

What This Taught Me

That hackathon I couldn't participate in? It wasn't a failure. It was a redirect. That embarrassment? That was fuel. Every competition we won. Every feature we built. Every late night spent debugging. It all came from a place of humility, not ego.

The real ego move would have been showing up unprepared and expecting to win. Instead, we showed up nervous. Uncertain. But persistent. We learned something important. Confidence isn't about being perfect. It's about being willing to show up imperfectly and keep improving.

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But There's More

This is just the beginning of the journey. After this first win, we participated in more competitions. We refined our techniques. We discovered new approaches. We won again. And again.

If you want to know:

• The technical techniques that made Sniffer 100x faster
• How many more competitions we won
• The pivotal moments that shaped our technical evolution
• The lessons learned from both victories and failures

Part 2 is coming soon.

Stay tuned for the technical deep-dive into deepfake detection, competition strategies, and how failing forward became our competitive advantage.

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*Have you had your own reality check moment? I'd love to hear your story. Share it in the comments below or reach out on X or LinkedIn.*Have you had your own reality check moment? I'd love to hear your story. Share it in the comments below or reach out on [X/LinkedIn]