adrenaline of shipping code

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, a 19 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

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onto today’s topic: adrenaline of shipping code 🤓 

that is perhaps the nerdiest topic line i’ve written to date, but i only really experienced the true satisfaction of shipping code yesterday after i stared at my ide and tweaked out for probably 6 hours straight in the library.

when i was demoing my solo-build in front of 30+ club members yesterday and it ran successfully, i was pretty damn ecstatic. the 3 judges also had slides ready with screenshots of our code and questions prepared to challenge our decisions, grill our quality of code, and tell us right there and then in front of the crowd whether or not our projects passed or failed. i passed unanimously, and it felt validating as hell. 💪 

it wasn’t a complex project — the tricky part was not being allowed to use gpt or cursor to generate any of my code. i was pushed to learn and read documentation, figure things out step by step, ask for help, and debug to a nightmarish extent.

i was tasked with cloning perplexity, which is akin to chatgpt, however it scrapes the web and uses natural language processing to generate answers. i was able to replicate two key functions: populating relevant sources as cards for the user to click on, and scraping information from those sources to generate a succinct summarized answer.

you can check out the repo here. i’ll probably run out of api tokens by the time some of you try out the deployed link though. 💀 

it was challenging, and i had forgotten how good it feels to really push myself intellectually. school isn’t a crazy challenge — it’s simple to hack the system once you figure it out. 🏫 the last time i felt this way was when i was building in sf and working an internship solving real healthcare issues in the world exactly last year. seems like there’s a theme for what excites me, right? ;)

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