My Journey
Vamshi Nenu
~5min read
Updated on: Aug 1, 2024
Hi, I am Vamshi Nenu, a.k.a Vamshi Krishna Karnayna. Let's first talk about "why not vamshikarnayana.com or any other domain name"? Thank you for not asking this, but I am going to answer it. I am a programmer, I am a designer, I am a creative person. I am a lot of things, human too. But my creative instincts told me not to go with a big name, and also not to go with a non-creative one. So I thought, well, there are a lot of I's in what I do, so why not vamshi nenu (which means "I"). It's like saying I am Vamshi in Telugu, which is my mother tongue.
Enough about the domain, I know you want to know about me. 09/20/2000 is the day I started my journey. I began crying, eating, and sleeping for almost the first couple of years of my career. Then, 15 years later, I started the last year of my schooling at Ravindra Bharathi School. I was told, always told, that I am not going to be a successful person. Maybe because I questioned a lot, or maybe the definition of success they gave didn't align with my journey. They (almost everyone but, my mom and best friends) thought I was going to fail the class. But I didn't. Instead, I got 83%. I was busy reading textbooks and googling about Benzene, Friction, Gravity, and Numbers.
Then, over the next two years 2015-2017, I was at Gitam Junior College for high school. I was overwhelmed with thoughts of what I could achieve with just numbers, integrals, and trigonometry. It made me a madman; I was so happy to just solve the entire textbook, like I was binge-watching Netflix, to be specific, Stranger Things. I was so busy doing all the maths that I was barely good enough at physics and chemistry. I was sad for the first time, not because I barely passed the language Sanskrit, but because I got 3 points less in Maths. But Math really helped me balance out my grades. I got 83% again! I'm not lying, Yes, I did get 83%. But don't worry, bachelors, are going to be worse. I promise.
4 years of chaos...
I was so confused about what to do next. Electrical Engineering?, Civil Engineering? I mean, all the engineering courses had some sort of numbers involved. But oh boy, computer science got into my mind. It felt like magic: you write some text, and run it, and the only limitation was your mind?. 2017-2021 I started my bachelor's in COMPUTER SCIENCE!!!!! at ACE Engineering College. You can relate it to the day when you first encountered code. I was excited. 1st year, 1st semester. I was happy to be there, to learn how things work in the computer realm. But I was so confused; they started to teach me chemistry and physics. If they hadn't included math, I would've lost my mind. I failed 3/5 courses. But hey, I got good grades in math. Here comes 1st year, 2nd semester. God damn it, This time it was Engineering drawing? and more Physics? but hey, they had 2 math courses, one was about calculus but complicated, and the other was about complex probability problems mwaaaaaah. I passed both. But not the other courses. I was called in by the head of the department about my progress. He said I am not good enough and need to work harder. I didn't care about what they were saying. I just nodded and said, "yes sir". I did not care about the grades. I never did. I guess they were able to see that in my face, and they escalated this issue to my mom. Don't worry, I've got the chillest mom ever. She knew I was smart, she knew I was failing all these courses, but never said anything. In the 2nd Year, 1st semester, I took things into my hands, and started skipping classes. Not to do something fun. Just to go to the library, and read the holy grail C programming book. This semester did not have any computer science-related courses. I looked up and it would start the next semester. I was doing programs, like writing my own function to find the square root of a number, not just ^0.5, but actually dividing. I was so good at this. Next semester, I had nothing to do, because I had all the courses related to computer science, and I'd read all of them. So it was time for me to pass the courses that I failed. and I did. except for (physics). 2nd year, 2nd semester, the semester, where I neither failed any courses nor got good grades, even though I had all the courses related to computer science. My answers/ code was always creative, I always used to show my cool tricks in coding, I guess they wanted a generic answer that was in textbooks. 2nd year, 2nd semester, is when I encountered music. It has numbers too; it was all about balance and creativity. So I made some music under the name vaanalen. I was getting good at coding, and I was getting good at music. And here comes COVID, I learned Flutter, python, javascript, and some HTML, CSS, SQL, and mongodb.. By using these, I built an app called puppet, an application that would go through all your PDFs and let you search by text and it would send you the right page on a PDF. I am creative, Hey, I am not bragging, but I am; let it be creating presentations, or creating apps that are useful and usable. I've submitted this as my minor project, and I blew everyone's minds, with my presentation, my app, and the fact that I was the only one on the team, and the app really worked, unlike other submissions.
June 2021, The time of my bachelor's, where I needed to do a project, this is when I started my idea of creating a learning management system. I was so locked in. But as usual, everyone was not impressed with my idea. They wanted to see some AI, Machine Learning projects. So me and my team did a project that predicts future house prices based on the location. They were impressed, but I was not. Why? Because, there was not much coding, we just needed a dataset, and we needed to train them. Tada, that's it. I don't understand why AI was such a hype.
Aug 2021 - Dec 2021, I worked on the courses that I failed, which included physics (the one from 1st year, yes, I finally made it in the last semester after 8 attempts), and other courses that weren't even related to computers! But I did it. I passed all of them. And parallelly, I worked on getting my admission for a Master's in the USA.
Wait a minute, where is fun in all this?. There was only maths and coding, not really, I was a mischievous kid. I used to call the college, pretending to be my dad, and used to say that I was sick and then go to the movies, I was the head of the class too, a class representative, and I used to win with majority, I was a good leader, and I used to teach my friends, how to code, and fun fact, I used to give them my notes, that I used to prepare, from reading the textbooks, I used to summarize, a 400 page book, to 10-15 pages. I used to debate with my professors, about topics, just to make my team have some fun in class. I was all about MY TEAM. everyone was getting good grades, actually better than me. And It came to an end where, I was forced to not be the leader, because I was all about balance, fun and knowledge. But my professors only cared about the grades. It is what it is moment. I was soo good at coding, I even made spowatch using python, get source code from github. which would delete temp data of spotify, and restart in under a second, to eliminate ads lol. Techically I wasn&spos;t hacking, I was just restarting spotify kind of. And I made another script called killbill using python, to remove background process that aren't needed to run anymore. why is chrome still running if I closed it... right!, updates? but I dont need to be on the latest version of chrome to watch youtube and browse github
Dec 25, 2021, I reached the United States, for masters in Data Science at Gannon University, I got 3.0 GPA. But again, It was not the gpa, I am here for, the people that I can meet and share my knowledge and in return get some of theirs. And I love it here, in the US. This is where My real journey/ purpose begins. First time ever I was noticed by professors, I was the best at my class, Stats, Data Mining, Text Mining, Big Data.I made vaunner, get it?, vamshi+runner, this was a script that I used to run my BigData python code, I was soo lazy to run couple of commands and moving files around and getting the output. I wrote a script, and was just running it. and was relaxing, in class, while others were just struggling to keep up with the next command that they need to run. Alot of scripts right... all about my vision of building visual apps. The Team I was in is the best, never made a number 2 project, Me and my team was always 1st. I made studysync.app A real time, Location based, Chat application. You could create groups, and talk with people that are in the same location and in same interest. Oct 2022, I got an offer to work at express scripts, now aquired by cigna insurance. I was happy, and was doing my best to learn, but most of the time I was confused, FYI, KPI, OOO, EOD, IMO, FYR, All I knew was WFH (work from home), thats what I did. But I learned really fast. I was creating some scripts on bash to migrate 250 million records from one db to another. I migrated an old jaxrs app into spring boot, (this was fun). I fixed bugs, related to mulithreading. and More!. I worked the next 2 years, in this company.
Okay back to Aug, 2023, It was that time of my masters, where I needed to do a Major project. if you did not miss a section of this journey, you know I like some LMS (Learning Management System) and I like to build them. And yes that was my project, and I was suprised, this time I was appreciated. Everyone was mind blown. My professor (hey Dr. Joshua) asked me to make a presentation on how to make a presentation. Everyone loves my presentations, I dont use powerpoint, I use Adobe AfterEffects. I like to show how locked in I was with my team and project.
I built a learning management system, and it was good, it was good to look at, and was easy to use, with complicated features, simplified with good UI, I built Project Learnx, using sveltekit, and It had basic features, that an LMS should have. But I was not impressed even though, my professor liked it. I wanted to take it to the next level, so here comes learni.app, I started working on a fork of Project Learnx, adding in more features. Making it into an actual learning management system. Its in work in progress, since I am the only one working on it, and I work on the weekends.