Hi, I’m Abi.

Last bench. Back row. Report cards my father signed without reading, for his own peace.

After school everyone went off to wait for campus. I walked into a software company and asked for the smallest job they had.

Intern by day. University student by night. I slept on the bus so often the conductor started waking me at my stop.

2022: medal for best performance at Level III. My old teacher asked for a photo. I sent it in A3.

It started with an app. It took money from my account twice, then showed me a smiley and the word “Oops”.

I swore I would find whoever wrote that screen. To find them I had to get inside. So I learned to code.

Eighteen months later I was on support for a payment gateway, reading every log in the building. I never found that developer.

Then one day a customer wrote in, furious, about a bug. I checked who wrote it. It was me. I kept the smiley.

I went to that office for a content job. Tamil articles, a bit of SEO, pocket money after A/Levels.

There were two queues. I stood in the wrong one for forty minutes, because at least it was moving.

At the end a man asked what I knew about .NET. I said “a little”, which was exactly how much I had heard of it.

They gave me a desk. Six job titles later, nobody has checked. Please do not tell HR.

Tuition class, 2019. She said she found people who understand computers very attractive.

I learned HTML in a week and built a website with her name on it. It had a marquee. It played music without asking.

She looked at it on my phone and said “nice”. What she had meant was someone who could fix her laptop.

By the time I could fix the laptop she had a new one. I started writing Tamil stories that same year. Draw your own conclusions.

At seventeen I put all my savings into a phone repair stall with a friend. Screens, batteries, the occasional miracle.

Then I flashed a customer’s phone and it never woke up again. The customer was a police officer.

To pay it off I started building apps for shops at five thousand rupees each. A rice shop. A tuition class. One very determined astrologer.

The stall closed. The apps kept getting calls. A company hired me, mostly so I would stop undercutting them.

Last day of A/Levels. A friend said nobody from our class would work in software before finishing a degree.

I said I would do it before the results came out. Two thousand rupees, witnessed by a tea shop.

February 2020: internship letter. He said an intern is not an engineer. So I kept going, one job title at a time.

Today I build AI systems for a living. He says AI is not real engineering. Double or nothing.