2024 — Freelancing, Chaos, and Somehow a Career

2024 was the year things stopped being “side projects” and started becoming actual work.

At the start of the year, my roommate and I had a random idea:

“What if we start a small agency?”

No pitch decks.
No strategy.
Just two developers and too much confidence.

And weirdly enough… it started working.

Clients began showing up, projects kept stacking, and at one point we were juggling 3–4 projects at the same time. Our room basically turned into a tiny startup office.

The Freelancing Grind

Freelancing teaches you things very quickly.

When you build for yourself, bugs are annoying.
When you build for a client, bugs suddenly become very urgent life problems.

Between building projects and shipping features, I also stepped into my first proper dev roles.

First was a Full-Stack Developer role at Styflowne. I worked on platforms like Earnifyy and StarCast OTT, building real systems with Node.js, TypeScript, and AWS.

Unfortunately… the company never paid me.

So that was a very educational experience.

Shortly after, I joined Sanchar XYZ as a Frontend Developer, working with Next.js, Tailwind, and real-time systems. We improved UX, optimized APIs, and actually shipped solid features.

Then the company shut down.

At this point I started wondering:

“Am I… the jinx?”

A Painful Goodbye

Earlier that year I was also working on a game called BOOM Baby.

It was something I genuinely loved building.

Then one day my game files got corrupted.

Completely gone.

Months of work disappeared in seconds. That was the moment I quietly accepted that my game dev era had ended.

Still hurts a little.

The Year Things Clicked

Somewhere during all this chaos something changed.

Clients trusted me.
People used things I built.
Projects started feeling bigger.

For the first time I thought:

“Okay… maybe I’m actually a developer now.”

The Plot Twist Ending

And then the year decided to end with a cinematic moment.

We won Smart India Hackathon 2024.

Standing there hearing our name announced felt surreal. All the late nights, debugging sessions, and chaotic builds suddenly made sense.

Looking Back

2024 was wild.

Freelancing agency.
Multiple projects running at once.
Two developer jobs (one scam, one shutdown).
A painful game dev ending.
And a national hackathon win.

Messy year.

But probably the year where everything started becoming real.