My Story
I am Amar Vishwanath Biradar. I was born in Bidar, Karnataka, and raised in Mumbai, Maharashtra. As a child, I was a quiet introvert. Now, I am slowly trying to become an extrovert 😊
School Days
I studied at Krist Raj High School. I always sat on the back bench, and I never thought of myself as a topper. I used to joke that I was a "below average" student. But looking back, those backbench days taught me something important: grades don't decide your future, curiosity does.
Back then, I loved sports like cricket and kabaddi. Video games were my weekend escape too. Every weekend, I would ask my mom for 5 rupees so I could play WWE and racing games at the PS5 shop for half an hour. That simple routine was the highlight of my week.
I grew up in Nallasopara, a place surrounded by hills. Maybe that's why I have always felt a deep connection with mountains. Even today, I tell myself, "I am a climber at heart." One day, I want to stand on top of Everest, Kanchenjunga, and Annapurna. These three peaks are my biggest dreams for the future.
The Turning Point
After finishing 10th grade, during the pandemic, my dad bought me a laptop. It wasn't easy for him to afford it, but that struggle made the gift even more special to me.
With my new HP laptop, I first explored graphic design. I learned Figma, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects. I picked up a lot of skills, but somehow, this field didn't excite me the way I expected.
That's when I discovered coding. I started watching Code With Harry's web development tutorials and built small projects like a tic-tac-toe game. Something clicked. Coding felt different. It felt like mine.
Moving Forward
After 10th grade, I joined Abhinav Junior College for my 11th and 12th. I completed my HSC board exams with First Class.
Looking back at this journey, from a backbencher who loved video games to someone who found real passion in building things with code, I know my story is just getting started. And somewhere between the mountains I dream of climbing and the code I love to write, I am figuring out who I want to become.
My Worst Regret
After 12th, I dropped a year. I couldn't clear a fucking competitive exam, and my rank felt like a phone number with negative infinity in front of it. It was a hard pill to swallow.
After that setback, I started learning web development in depth. Curiosity pulled me in, and within three months, I had learned a lot. But somewhere along the way, life turned dark. I fell into a low, depressed mood. I had no job, and I carried a constant feeling of sarcasm and frustration.
At one point, I decided to give up on tech altogether and gave an interview at D-Mart. But my family stopped me from taking that path. They pushed me to look for something different, maybe an IT job instead. Around that time, I also faced bullying and constant comparisons with friends, which made things even harder.
Then, in January 2025, I finally landed an internship. It was unpaid, but it didn't matter. I learned more in those months than I had in a long time, and it rebuilt my curiosity about how the internet actually works.
Curiosity Goes Further
That unpaid internship became the real turning point of my life. I dove deep into backend development and built a small WebSocket project, a chatting app, while also learning database design and architecture.
From there, I moved into DevOps. I learned CI/CD pipelines, Docker, and deployment processes using GitHub Actions. I worked on a few local freelance projects too, an e-commerce site and a company portfolio.
Then came my biggest project yet: an LMS (Learning Management System). It was one of the most challenging things I've built, full of research, late nights, and constant grinding. I finished it within a month. The video and live streaming features in the LMS ran on the YouTube API, so I integrated the full YouTube API along with OBS software using OBS WebSocket to connect everything to the LMS.
But then I hit a new problem: YouTube's auto-quality setting inside the iframe wasn't giving me the control I needed. That problem sparked even more curiosity. I dug into AWS, EC2, SES, S3, ASG, SQS, and CloudWatch Alarms, learning and practicing each service until I finally built my own video streaming and encoding architecture.
I learned all of this through YouTube videos, documentation, blogs, and AI. And if there's one thing I've come to believe, it's this: If you stay curious, you will always beat everyone else.
Fav Movies
Bollywood
Hollywood
Books
"If it was easy, anyone could have done it."