One Evening, Two C Projects, and a Lot of printf Debugging

July 22, 2024 is a date I remember with a half-smile — because I pushed two C repositories the same day: Rock Paper Scissors and an Online Ticket Booking System. It sounds chaotic, and it was, but that chaos carried energy. Rock Paper Scissors was my warm-up, a game loop that reminded me how satisfying fundamental logic can be when it finally clicks. Ticket Booking was the heavier lift — data structures, file handling, and the kind of messy requirements that mimic real software just enough to hurt. I learned memory discipline the hard way, chasing segmentation faults like they were personal insults. What I love about this milestone is the honesty of it: no frameworks to hide behind, no libraries to blame. Just C, patience, and printf. The ticket booking repo kept evolving into 2025, which tells me I had stumbled onto something I actually cared about finishing. These projects sit early in my timeline, but they still explain me — I like building systems that look simple until you inspect the seams. That evening taught me something lectures sometimes skip: confidence comes from surviving the debugger, not from reading slides. My professor called C unforgiving; I call it clarifying. When you cannot blame a framework, you learn faster. That evening gave me two repos and one habit: finish before you chase the next idea. Both repos still sit in my GitHub as proof that fundamentals reward patience — especially when everything else in the timeline moves toward AI.