The Double Life: Student by Day, Builder by Night
Startup? What, Why & How!!
This started in my first semester of college during a casual discussion between a peer student and me. The discussion was all about taking money from parents even at 17-18 years of age. The immediate thought we had was to do some side hustle to reduce asking money from parents.
I don't exactly remember (as I am writing this blog post after a year) why we got into web dev even with no prior experience in it. But somehow we managed to get our first client at ushodayanetworks.com. The first site we made was a bridal collection showcase/gallery site. I still remember I tried to copy the whole inspect section of a famous website kalkifashion.com and tried to rebuild it locally. Obviously, it was a failed attempt. Then we found some workaround to construct the codebase from the side [some extension]. We tried it and were not satisfied with it.
After a couple of days of research, we got to know about v0, Vercel's website building AI. We made the whole site kavyareddy.in using v0 without any knowledge in web development. Yet, after facing some issues with deployment and domain mapping, we successfully launched the site. This is the time I got a realization to learn things instead of pretending to know things. I started learning JavaScript, and in parallel built the ushodayanetworks.com site using React.js.
As we got better at React, something shifted. Ushodaya Networks started as a way to make pocket money, but it turned into my laboratory. The skills I was forced to learn were no longer just for clients, but out of my own interest. (I still refer to it as "forced" because I was lazy to learn at that point in time). If I hadn't started and struggled with the early freelance gigs, I never would have had the confidence to work for the Anokha 2026 edition or build something like "On Duty Amrita". I realized that coding isn't just about making things look pretty (like my failed copy of the Kalki Fashion site); it's about logic, data flow, and architecture. That's when the obsession with Data Structures and deeper engineering concepts kicked in.
My Take on AI Tools (The v0 Dilemma)
Looking back, starting with v0 wasn't a mistake; it was a shortcut to value. But here is the catch that beginners miss:
"AI CAN BUILD YOU A PROTOTYPE, BUT IT CAN'T BUILD YOU A CAREER"
When kavyareddy.in had deployment issues, ChatGPT couldn't fix the DNS records for me because I didn't even know what a DNS record was. That experience taught me a golden rule:
"Use AI to speed up what you already know, do not use AI to hide what you don't know."
Where Are We Now?
Fast forward to today, and the "why" has changed. It's no longer just about not asking parents for money. It's about the thrill of building. We went from copying inspect-elements code to building custom RFID systems and experimenting with complex backends. Ushodaya Networks was the sandbox where I stopped being just a student and started being an engineer.
If you are reading this and thinking of starting something: start before you are ready. Say yes to the client. Fail at copying the code. Use the AI tools. Just make sure that every time you fail, you open up the documentation and figure out why.
The "Student" Part of the Equation (The "Engineering" Part of this Double Life)
If you look at my GitHub, you might assume I am acing every CS class. The reality? I'm a solidly below-average-to-average student. And I'm okay with that.
There is a constant tug-of-war in my brain. On one hand, I have an interest in learning new things and clients waiting for updates. On the other hand, I have exams on theoretical concepts that I know I'll never use in that specific way.
The "Builder's Curse"
The problem isn't that I can't study; it's that I struggle to study things that feel dead.
For example: give me a problem like "fix this server latency" or "build a chess PGN analyzer," and I will stay up for 48 hours straight, learning every algorithm needed to solve it. Whereas give me a textbook and tell me to memorize definitions for an exam, or ask me to study outdated techniques when the follow-up subtopic in the textbook itself is the better technique which is accepted universally and used, I just feel why do I need to learn something which is replaced by a better one. I can understand it is to make students understand why it failed. But practically speaking, in the real world that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is: are you capable of solving a completely unknown problem?
I've realized that I treat my degree differently than most. I don't chase CGPA. I treat college as a resource center. When a subject actually helps me build better software—something like data structures or operating systems—I obsess over it. I dive deep. But for everything else? I do just enough to survive.
The Balancing Act
This "double life" isn't about being perfect at both; it's about stealing time from one to feed the other. Sometimes that means sacrificing a grade to ship a product. Sometimes it means pausing a project to save my semester. It's messy, it's stressful, and my parents might not always love the report card—but the skills I'm building in the real world are the ones I'm betting my future on.