My Story 📖

I'm Ayush Chugh, a full stack developer based in Chandigarh, India. I write code for a living and lead a team at Avenue Ticketing. Right now I lead a team there. Everything below is what happened before that title meant anything.

Origin

I grew up in Jalalabad, a small town in Punjab's Fazilka district. Middle class family, ordinary street, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. I did my schooling at DAV Public School, and for most of that time I had exactly one plan for my life. I wanted to be an IPS officer.

That dream is the reason I studied so hard. Good marks were not really about marks. They felt like the first bricks of a life my family could be proud of. So I studied. School, tuition, then more studying at home. Top three in class, almost every time.

If you had met me back then, you would have seen a nerdy, slightly chubby kid with no hobbies and not much to say. No sports, nothing outside school and books. I was not unhappy about it. It simply never occurred to me that life could be anything else.

Where it started

Then the world stopped. COVID arrived, the lockdown began, and suddenly all that structure disappeared. No school to go to, no tuition to rush for. Just a lot of empty hours and a boy who had never learned how to fill them.

Around that time I got quietly obsessed with day in the life videos. I would watch IPS officers, the uniform, the routine, the weight of the job. In the same house, my brother was watching the same kind of videos about software engineers. Two completely different lives playing on two different screens, and both of them looked incredible to me. I just did not know yet which one was supposed to be mine.

Mostly, though, I was playing games. One day, somewhere in the middle of a match, a small thought showed up and refused to leave. Maybe I should do something with this time. Maybe I should not waste it. I looked things up and landed on Python, because that is what everyone online seemed to be learning. My brother told me to slow down and start with the basics. Learn C first, he said.

So there I was, thirteen years old, staring at Turbo C. That old blue screen with the harsh colors. The basic syntax made sense to me. Then the third video in the playlist was about memory management, and I understood absolutely nothing. It felt like a door slamming shut. I gave up and went straight back to PUBG.

A few days later my brother was building a website for a college project. He turned the screen toward me and asked what I thought of the design. I pointed out a few things. And then he opened VS Code. After the ugliness of Turbo C, this looked like something from the future. The dark theme, the colors dancing across the syntax, the fact that you could type a few lines and something real would appear on the screen. That was the moment. He shared a few YouTube tutorials with me and I learned HTML and CSS in about a week.

Five days into all of this, the lockdown eased a little. My family had been planning to move to Chandigarh whenever things settled down, and we decided not to wait any longer. So I landed in a new city in 9th grade, still stuck mostly indoors, with no friends and nothing familiar around me. All I had was a second hand HP laptop. Barely any RAM, a tired processor, the kind of machine that starts struggling the moment you open a few tabs. I sat with it for seven or eight hours a day and just kept going.

Learning by building

This was before AI. There was no ChatGPT to quietly rescue you when something broke at midnight. When I got stuck, and I got stuck constantly, I would spend days digging through Stack Overflow threads, old GitHub issues, and random Discord servers. It was slow and it was frustrating and sometimes it made me feel stupid. But it also gave me something I did not expect. It gave me people. The strangers who answered my clumsy questions, the developers I kept running into in the same corners of the internet. When I had no friends in real life, those forums quietly became my social life.

I never followed a proper roadmap. I just kept building whatever I was curious about. JavaScript came next, then Git, then SCSS, each one picked up on that same struggling HP laptop.

In February 2021 I shipped my first real project, a2infinite, with my cousin. Plain HTML, CSS, and SCSS. It was rough around every edge, but it was live. A real person could open a browser and see something I had made. That feeling meant more to me than any marksheet ever had.

While we were building it, we would sit at his place and dream out loud. We once listed out an entire Apple setup, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, all of it, and added up the price. Around twenty lakh rupees. On my little HP, at thirteen, that number felt like it belonged to another universe.

Years later, a lot of that list stopped being a fantasy. I pay my own bills and college fees. I help out at home. We bought a car and a plot for our next home. The part I am proudest of is not any of those things on their own. It is that my family does not have to carry me anymore.

From writing code to owning outcomes

Somewhere in there, coding stopped being a hobby. By 2022 I was building things real people used. The first time I owned a whole product end to end was Shri Property, a real estate platform I built for my family. Interface, backend, admin dashboard. It taught me what it felt like to ship something complete.

The first time I did that for someone outside my family was at Vibranium Soft, building worldtravelsonline.in, a B2B flight booking platform with thousands of users every day. That was when it clicked for me. Code is not the point. The business and the people using it are the point.

After that the work kept getting heavier. Investment dashboards, client projects, open source. Same lesson every time. Show up, take ownership, build things that hold.

Then came Avenue Ticketing. I joined as a part time full stack developer on a ticketing platform. Payments, authentication, events where nothing is allowed to break on the night of the show. By August I became team lead. Seven people look to me now, and I am still figuring out what kind of leader I am supposed to be.

I also co-founded Ravix Studio as CTO for a few months, building SaaS products. That chapter is paused now.

All of this, and I am still in college. Third year. Most days I sit on the last bench with my laptop open, then come home and code until midnight. Some days I am running on very little and it is not glamorous at all. Some nights I lie awake wondering if I should have chased the IPS dream instead, or if I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I do not know yet. I just keep showing up the next morning anyway.

Sharing what I learn

I started writing because explaining something is the only way I know if I actually understand it. Lately I share more of that as it happens, on social media and here, while I am still figuring things out. Not after they are polished. If one person skips a mistake I already made, that is enough.

What's next

I do not know where life goes from here. I know what I want, though. My girl, my family, building things that take care of them. Small side projects for the joy of it, open sourced, no pitch deck required. The boy from Jalalabad who wanted to be an IPS officer never fully disappeared. He just found a different way to be useful.

If you want dates and tech stacks, that is on my resume. For things I have built, see projects. And if any of this felt familiar, get in touch.