[ishandotpage]

When I was in high school, I was kind of into competitive programming. We wanted to conduct contests, but the labs didn't have internet access, so we couldn't use stuff like SPOJ/Codeforces.

To make it easier for our computer club to conduct small contests, I made a small application in Python that could display problems, accept submissions, and automatically grade them.

It had a horrible "single page" UI that used jquery to hide and show divs to switch pages, and obviously had 0 sandboxing, but it got the job done for our purposes.

A couple of years later, a CEO of a local startup was visiting my high school, and he happened to catch the program in action. His business had been struggling with a hairy Google Drive integration and he asked me if I had any ideas. That eventually led to a part-time offer, which became full time after I graduated.

So yeah, it was quite serendipitous. While the project wasn't directly related to my job, it did give me an in, even though the code quality was so shoddy it makes me shudder to even think about it now.