In September 2015, when I was 17, I moved to St. Petersburg with my friend and a former classmate to study at ITMO.
Just a month into the start of our studies, I received an invitation to participate in a student developers competition. The task was to develop a mobile game with a specific narrative. I shared it with my friend, and after a brief discussion, we made a decision to participate.
In a nutshell, we spent two months on the development, during which I mastered Java, delved into object-oriented programming concepts, and, in the end, we won in the "Best Code Quality" category. An amount of money we earned was insane for students who just left their parents home.
This victory became one of the defining factors in my future. While our university peers were studying array sorting algorithms, we created a real product and made real money in just two months.
After missing two months of classes, I honestly tried to catch up and get back into the learning process. However, to be frank, I no longer had much desire because it became perfectly clear to me that self-learning is much more effective when it comes to practical development skills. Since my friend's and my priorities have always been tangible achievements over abstract knowledge, we managed to complete the first year of study and decided to leave the university to continue learning and progressing independently.
In September 2015, when I was 17, I moved to St. Petersburg with my friend and a former classmate to study at ITMO.
Just a month into the start of our studies, I received an invitation to participate in a student developers competition. The task was to develop a mobile game with a specific narrative. I shared it with my friend, and after a brief discussion, we made a decision to participate.
In a nutshell, we spent two months on the development, during which I mastered Java, delved into object-oriented programming concepts, and, in the end, we won in the "Best Code Quality" category. An amount of money we earned was insane for students who just left their parents home. This victory became one of the defining factors in my future. While our university peers were studying array sorting algorithms, we created a real product and made real money in just two months.
After missing two months of classes, I honestly tried to catch up and get back into the learning process. However, to be frank, I no longer had much desire because it became perfectly clear to me that self-learning is much more effective when it comes to practical development skills. Since my friend's and my priorities have always been tangible achievements over abstract knowledge, we managed to complete the first year of study and decided to leave the university to continue learning and progressing independently.