Forem: Adhithyan B

Going Towards Nothing (But Still Applying Anyway)

Adhithyan B — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 04:54:19 +0000

Applying off-campus, especially in this job market, has been a greater battle for the past couple of years. As AI ATS and other “AI methods” have entered application filtering, it is even harder for employers to notice good employees with good skill sets. HR who put random skill sets they hear from their technical colleagues lead to job descriptions like “we need db, machine learning, UI/UX designing, in a nutshell, everything,” and all for a 12-hour unpaid intern.

Desperation and Its Impact on Mental Health

The “12-hour unpaid intern where you do literally everything” sounds cruel from a sane point of view, but students and freshers still apply to them, thanks to desperation.

Peer pressure, placement panic, news about layoffs, and a tough job market for freshers all cause individuals to doubt their potential. This can lead to a spiral of low self-esteem and self-doubt about their abilities, preventing them from thinking clearly and leading to anxiety attacks and breakdown episodes.

The thought of "I know this internship is terrible" yet still applying for it can really disturb your peace of mind. It feels like you're heading towards failure, making you more vulnerable and desperate.

The Art of Writing Unrealistic JDs

HRs… I don’t know what they’re doing half the time. And most startups and mid-size companies that don’t have a proper hiring workflow just let HR handle the JDs. And oh boy, the descriptions are wild — “Node, API, REST API, React, Vue.js, Angular” — all for an entry-level or intern role for UI/UX designing. BRUH.

And this leads students and freshers to juggle skill sets half their life, trying to tick every box, and in the process they don’t specialize in a single skill — basically ending up learning none properly at the end of the day.

HRs should actually sit down and have a proper talk with their tech colleagues and ask them “even if the market is sad right now what skills a fresher really needs to have”, and then write the JD based on that.

The market is bad, sure. But that doesn’t mean students should turn into “do everything” machines just to survive it.

Unrealistic expectations from companies shouldn’t become unrealistic pressure on ourselves.

From Excitement to Silence: What Building My First Open Source Project Taught Me

Adhithyan B — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:46:51 +0000

I am always fascinated by how open source grows into a full community from small PR requests, issue raises, eventually becoming something big.The number of people/developers who benefit from open source initiatives is significant.

What makes open source truly beautiful is the community it has, with a vast variety of minds and different approaches to solving issues. We can gain valuable insights and programming practices from these contributors.

So, being the curious cat I am, I wanted that feeling—the feeling of building a community and learning as I go. I started brainstorming on what to solve, whether I should start big or small, and what tech stack to use. Basically, I was daydreaming about the moments where I'd be maintaining tons of PRs and issues.

Then came a perfect idea—whenever I’m designing screens and mockups in Figma, I end up with a dozen tabs of design tools open and no clue which one’s which. Total chaos. So I figured, why not build a curated tools platform where designers and frontend developers can browse resources and tools by category—UI/UX, React, and so on. It felt like the perfect idea: it solved a real-world problem (for me, at least) and was the ideal gateway to learn about open source. Also, my resume was looking a little dry, so this felt like the perfect time to add value to it.

What Came After the Build

Finished the project and I was genuinely proud of myself.Went to GitHub, set up branch rules, wrote docs for everything, even raised a few issues myself so contributors would have something to work on.

Then came the waiting game. “Now we wait,” I told myself. And the result? Not a single soul clicked my links. Got a few pity views when I posted it on LinkedIn and shared it with friends, but after four to six months… I couldn’t honestly say my website helped anyone. No tool submissions, no PRs, no issues — just the three I raised myself. (And yeah, I solved one of them).

But here's the thing — it was still rewarding.
Sure, the website isn't perfect since I vibe coded half the backend stuff (the code structure and API routes are… let's say, questionable), but I learned things I once swore I'd never touch.

I got my hands dirty with backend stuff — APIs, HTTP, all that black magic.
I dove into SQL, learned how to create tables and manage them through an ORM.
And on top of that, I finally got a grip on responsive design. I got myself a decent project to put on my resume and portfolio.

Start Early

You don't need to know everything to start something new.

This has always been true, even before AI, Developers would build with what they knew and then search Stack Overflow and documentation to learn what they didn't know and explore further. Now, it's even faster with AI—if you have a new question, just ask it. And if you prefer the old way, you can ask AI to scrap the specific documentation and sections you need.

The key is to just start. You never really understand what you’re dealing with until you dive headfirst into the rabbit hole — failing, getting frustrated at your own code, and trial-and-erroring the most ridiculous things.

But that’s the point doing it anyway.

We novice developers often fall into the perfectionist trap!

Trying to get everything right on the first attempt.Ironically, that tendency fades only with experience… and to gain experience, you’ve got to actually do the thing.

A 2014 study by Denny, Luxton-Reilly, and Simon backs this up. They explored the “build–measure–learn” loop and found that when learners get immediate feedback and are encouraged to “try–fail–fix,” their performance improves significantly — proving that doing first and perfecting later beats the “perfect-first” mindset every time.

The perfectionist mindset also comes with baggage.It leads to more stress, lower learning outcomes, and a tendency to procrastinate — because when you’re obsessed with getting it just right, you end up doing nothing at all.

Final thoughts

If you’re planning to build something — big or small, simple or complex — just start.

Do it, and learn as you go. Especially now, when AI has come such a long way, don’t hate it — use it smartly. Let it accelerate your learning, not replace it.

Make it exist first. Don’t know backend? Vibe-code it. Ask what each function does along the way. Once it’s done, go back, read the docs, and learn the deeper stuff.

Did the project bring in skyrocketing traffic? Probably not.
Did you step out of my comfort zone and learn some cool shit? Definitely!

Because at the end of the day, progress beats perfection every single time.

If you’re curious (or just want to see the ancient ruins of my open-source experiment): https://dev-juice.vercel.app/

How I see AI as a Fresher Frontend Dev

Adhithyan B — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 02:12:06 +0000

The moment I started learning HTML, CSS, and other frontend frameworks, I had one rule for myself: “Minimal to no AI usage — I want to learn things deeply and build a solid foundation.” It sounded like a foolproof plan. And to be fair, it was on paper. But in practice? I was learning properly, just not effectively. Endless tutorial hells, half-finished projects scattered across folders, and the occasional mini breakdown made me wonder if this was just part of the developer's ritual or if I was doing something wrong.

AI isn't a threat that replaces beginners—it's actually a valuable learning tool.

I realized this during my internship at a GenAI startup, where we were building a chatbot-like solution.I was in charge of designing and developing the frontend. Everything was fine until it came time to turn the mockups into a React app. Problem was, I was new to React and struggling to keep up with deadlines. So i took a React course and followed it through. I did learned the core concepts, got familiar with components, hooks and props (basic react essentials), and finally started piecing things together.

After learning the basics, I started building the frontend for the project. So, was I suddenly delivering sleek, production-ready components? SIKE I was even slower than before second-guessing every decision.
“Is this how they do it?”
“Is this production-ready?”
“Am I overcomplicating things?”

Eventually, I dropped my ego and thought, “Welp, let me try GPT.”
And honestly, it helped A LOT. I started learning new concepts and breaking down tough ideas into something I could actually understand. It even showed me real-world examples of how professional devs approached similar problems, which helped kill that constant self-doubt.

In short, I started learning in my own way instead of blindly following tutorials or documentation. Those are great once you know the fundamentals — but early on, you need something that speaks your language, not just the “YouTuber” way of doing things.

AI still struggles with frontend and creative aspects!

When it comes to frontend, AI still has a long way to go. Sure, it can spin up a landing page with fancy animations and filler content in minutes(which is impressive not gonna lie). But after scrolling for a few seconds, you can instantly tell “Nope tis shit AI“.

That’s because AI still can’t replicate creative juices, the thought process behind every margin, motion, or hover effect. A developer-built site feels alive because there’s reasoning behind each and every design choice. When a dev explains why a certain animation triggers or how a layout guides user focus, that’s creativity, not computation.

When I was building a bento layout for one of my projects, I wanted it to be responsive across all viewports. The problem was I barely knew how TailwindCSS handled responsiveness at that point. So, I asked GPT to make the layout responsive and gave it some context about how many rows and columns each viewport should have.

It did give me code, but it also completely wrecked my existing structure. The layout I had carefully built turned into something unrecognizable. Still, it wasn’t a total waste I got a basic idea of how responsiveness worked. After a few tweaks and some trial and error, I finally achieved the desired outcome.

Ironically, it probably would’ve taken me less time if I’d done it all from scratch.

AI might eventually get better at mimicking creativity, but for now, it’s still has alot to catch up. In my opinion, design, the art of making something feel right and overall creativity might be the toughest skill for AI to truly recreate.

Final Thoughts

If you want AI to give you great results, you have to feed it context — what you want, what you expect, and what it should avoid. But to provide context you first need to understand the basics of what you’re asking for.

If you want a different layout for mobile and desktop, you should already know how grids and flex work. If you’re going for parallax scroll animations, you need to understand concepts like delay and stagger.

AI can help you move faster and explore new ideas, but it can’t replace a developer’s understanding or creative intent. At the end of the day, it’s just a tool. Ignoring it isn’t an option either it’s already part of the workflow in most modern organizations.