One Year Since Hello, World

One year ago around this time, I typed my first line of code.

Printed Hello, World.

I wasn't one of those people who grew up coding. You hear stories about developers who started programming when they were 9 or 12 everywhere. I started only a year ago.

In fact, I didn't even know ordinary people in Addis Ababa could build software. I never stopped to wonder who made the applications I opened every day. I assumed the whole thing was done by the companies that made the machines. It's hard to believe I thought that now.

Last year, I was a second-year medical student, although I already knew medicine wasn't where I wanted to spend my life. I was reading a lot of books at the time.
I stumbled into the world of software in a book about building wealth, The Millionaire Fastlane. For the first time, I understood what software actually was.

I started seeing websites and apps differently.

Behind every one of them was someone who had solved a problem once, and thousands of people benefit from it every single day.

After that, I noticed it everywhere. Education. Banking. Transportation. Healthcare. Every industry was being reshaped by people writing code.

I remember thinking, this is it.

This is what I want to spend my life doing.

I didn't fall in love with code.

I fell in love with what code made possible.

For the first time in a long time, I knew exactly what I wanted to become.

Around this time last year (July 2025), I got my first computer and started CS50's Introduction to Computer Science.

I still think it was the perfect place to begin. It taught me that programming is a way to communicate with computers.

From there, I kept going.

Some days I made real progress.

Some days I wondered whether I was actually doing the right thing.

One thing I didn't expect was how lonely learning online could be.

Nobody around me was building software.

Most of my friends were social science students. If I wanted to be around developers, I had to go find them.

So I did.

I showed up to hackathons, developer meetups, and community events.

I reached out to people who were further ahead than me.

Almost everyone I met was generous with their time. Looking back, those conversations mattered just as much as the tutorials.

Eventually, I started working on my own projects.

I volunteered to build a website for my church.

I started turning my own ideas into products on the internet.

Then AI changed how software gets built.

I know a lot of people see that as something to fear.

I never saw it as something that would replace me. I saw it as a tool that lets one person solve bigger problems than ever before.

Today, exactly one year after printing Hello, World, I'm starting my first paid software project.

I'm helping an education company build internal tools that make their marketing team's work easier.

I'm excited about the project.

But I'm even more excited about what it represents.

Over the past year, one belief has only become stronger.

The more I learn about software, the more convinced I become that thousands of businesses spend hours every day doing work that simply shouldn't exist anymore.

Just because nobody has built them a better way.

That's the kind of work I want to do.

I want to help founders turn ideas into products.

I want to help businesses replace repetitive work with software that quietly does the job in the background.

I want technology to feel less intimidating and more useful.

A year ago, I wrote "Hello, World."

Today, someone is trusting me to build software for their business.

It's a small milestone in the grand scheme of things.

But every journey has a moment where the dream stops feeling like a dream and starts feeling real.

For me, I think this was that moment.