npx life@2024 preview: How Missing Flights, Finding Love, and Building Svelte Apps Changed Everything

Yo devs! 👋 Having a literal breakdown right now (the good kind though!). Remember that feeling when your code works after 47 failed deployments? Yeah, multiply that by 100 — that’s me today.

Let me take you back to 2018. There I was, a random guy from Bardiya, Nepal, armed with a potato laptop and dreams bigger than my RAM size. Started like every other small-town dev — HTML, CSS, and enough Python to print “Hello World” in rainbow colors (jk, it was console only 😅).

Created my first Fiverr profile with some janky Photoshop gigs. Thought I was gonna be the next big thing, you know? Spoiler alert: zero orders lol. My SEO game was trash back then. Like, absolute garbage. We’re talking “I’ll edit your photo professional” type listings with descriptions that’d make GPT-3 cry 💀

Fast forward to 2020. I’m grinding through college, studying science; Chemistry, Physics, Maths, and Computer Science. Covid struck, college closed. And I had to return to my home town.

Back home, I am learning Python because everyone said it’s “beginner-friendly” (narrator: “The friendly part was debatable”). That’s when my dad drops this casual reminder about Fiverr. Now, if you’re from a small town in Nepal, you know that your parents usually want you to chase government jobs or move abroad. But my dad? Man’s out here telling me to keep trying on Fiverr. GOAT behaviour fr.

Started pushing out WordPress gigs because that’s what everyone was doing. But guess what? Still crickets in my inbox. Why? Because your boy thought keyword research was beneath him. Imagine being too lazy to Google how to get clients. That was me, peak imposter syndrome hours 🤦‍♂️

But here’s where it gets interesting. I fell into the Django rabbit hole between failing at Fiverr and questioning my life choices. We’re talking stay-up-till-4am-debugging kind of obsession. My friends are out there living their best lives, gaming and goships and all, and I’m getting hyped about successfully running python manage.py runserver without errors.

I bought my first shared-hosting cPanel-based server, thinking I was about to revolutionize. Narrator: “He was not.” Failed…