2018 is almost gone and it is time to review some of the good and some improvable events from the past year. I’ll also list down some TODOs in the end, derived from the list of things that I could’ve improved upon.

In a brief

The year started on a remote village’s railway station in Odissa, during the 2017 Jagriti Yatra. On returning from the Yatra, I was headed for some adventures in LaughGuru, work related and otherwise. I enjoyed staying at my new house in Mumbai a lot. Life was very chill until I had to depart from LaughGuru around mid of this year. After that, I spent some time learning full stack development with Python, then started applying to companies. Around mid-October, I had found a new full time job. The next two months were spent preparing for it, learning some non-tech things and just spending some good time with friends and family.

Highlights

Some things went right; planned or otherwise, and I learned a lot from them. Here are some of them from the past year.

• Visited various places in the Jagriti Yatra, spoke with many unique individuals and made friends.
• Took over bigger responsibilities of the codebase (and the tech team) of LaughGuru. Learned how major features are planned and implemented.
• Learned quite a lot of advanced CSS and some SASS, implemented designs that were way out of my league.
• Learned functional programming. Concepts were learned from Haskell, but most of the actual implementation was in Javascript.
• Made small contributions to Freedom of the Press (and some other) repositories. Got the DigitalOcean Hacktober tee.
• Learned backed development with Python and Flask. Learned how ORMs are used, schemas designed, app structured and tested.
• Landed a new job, interviewed with many companies and spoke with many interesting and smart people.
• My algorithms, data structures and computer science game in general was leveled up, thanks to the interviews.
• Learned how overflows and overflow exploits, function calls actually work under the hood among other interesting low level stuff (thanks, Hacking – The Art of Exploitation).
• Read some 15-20 (hard, soft and audio) books, most non-tech. Many were classics like 1984, Sapiens, The Mythical Man Month, The Selfish Gene and Pragmatic Programmer.
• Read Applied cryptography and Serious cryptography, got a hands on with Coursera’s Cryptography 1 course by Dan Boneh, wrote ELi5s on cryptography primitives.

Mistakes and Areas To Improve

There is always room for improvement (a lot of it in my case), and in the following points, I’ll list down my own observations and some by my friends on ways to self-improvement.

• Didn’t keep in touch well with friends and relatives.
• Wrote very little actual code, especially in the second half of the year. Didn’t learn a new language or technology either.
• Didn’t contribute to the open source as much as I’d have liked.
• Didn’t implement the cryptographic primitives that I had spent a lot of time learning.
• Spent too much time browsing reddit/youtube that could’ve been used to read books/learn something worthwhile.
• Had a private room but didn’t set up the ideal work station that I had always wished for.
• Didn’t workout regularly and got marginally overweight.
• Didn’t plan the post-LaughGuru time properly, and didn’t follow whatever little plan I had religiously.
• Got a chance to speak at a tech conference, missed it.
• Didn’t dressed up decently, or looked like a professional.

# TODO in 2019

• Web engineering, security engineering and open source needs to take front seats again.
• Make active efforts to keep in touch and maintain healthy relationships with friends and relatives, be a nice-r person to be around in general.
• Participate in opensource communities and build real, useful projects.
• Walk, exercise and meditate daily. Wake up early.
• Practice and get good at public speaking.
• Save money and travel during holidays.
• Read 24 books.
• Put into practice the software engineering best practices that I have learned in the past year.
• Remind myself that consistency and regular practice to become better at something beats one time wonders and luck on any day, and it is fun to be disciplined and process, systems oriented.

See you next year!

I hope you had a great year as well. I also hope you have a wonderful new year, filled with interesting problems, learnings and experiences.

Thank you for reading!

I went through an interesting roller-coaster of understanding what the world of computers and the internet actually looked like in real life. Having no software engineer in my family or friends didn’t help either. The net effect was that I had no idea what actual software development looks like, or how different it would be from the online programming idealism that I was exposed to early on.

It was in the second half of my college that I really understood that most software engineering jobs are not the glorious stay-up-late-night-to-save-the-world kinds. The stay-up-late-night part might still be applicable, but for completely different (and often, less significant) reasons.

So you’re excited to do good work, and have lots of energy that you wish to put into something meaningful and worthwhile, what do you do? A couple of my friends and college acquaintances decided to start their own companies, and I found that very interesting. Some went for a masters degree in western countries, and that is also a great option. For me, I decided to go work for startups.

In this article, I’ll list some interesting aspects of working for startups which I’ve learnt in my little journey so far.

Flexibility

Flexibility is being able to bend rules to fit some edge case or just be more human. Yes, the office time is 9-5, but if it makes me more productive to work 11-7, why not? Maybe I’d like to work from home some days a week, or maybe I’ll want to work more hours this month and take a vacation in the next. Not hungry during the lunchtime? Feel free to eat your meal later when you feel like. Of course, with great flexibility comes greater need for discipline and care must be taken to not misuse the trust your employer has in you.

I personally like it when things are flexible, but you must remember that things work both ways. Your employer might also expect some degree of flexibility from you (so occasional work on the weekend, longer work hours when nearing a release etc). As in the case with you in the above paragraph, be mindful about keeping it a fair transaction for both the parties.

Culture and Bonding

The startup culture is usually very friendly and informal. In case of small startups, you know almost all the people working for the company by their first names. Small talks are common, storytelling is a good way of deepening the bonding and so is sharing your lunch. At the startups that I worked for in the past, the entire team had their lunch together (or went out to have lunch in the nearby restaurants). We celebrated together when it was someone’s birthday, had a town hall once a month where the entire team would come together and present updates on what they’ve been up to.

As a result of all of that, the atmosphere was most often very positive, and when that’s the case, one looks forward to waking up and going to the office every day. It is a win-win for everyone.

Impact and Work

The next important bit is the impact of your work. In any early-stage startup, you’re sure to find loads of opportunities to build interesting features, be responsible for major chunks of the codebase and be an integral part of the team in general. A small startup is unlikely to have funds to hire multiple people for similar roles. Hence, the job will require you to take ownership and be responsible for anything that has to do with your part of the codebase, which is an excellent stimulant to do good work.

You might also need to occasionally work outside the scope of your job (talk to users, brainstorm the exact requirements, give your input in other parts of the product/service etc). It will get intense at times (the realization that you are responsible for a particular part of the product can be intimidating in the beginning), and you’d have to remind yourself that it is all part of the experience, the adventure. Like Sigmund Freud said,

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful

I certainly remember the day when I and my manager had to work till 4 in the morning to get a prototype ready for demo due next day (technically, the same day), or the last few weeks at my previous workplace where we were pushing ourselves to deliver. I feel I’m naive enough to enjoy these experiences instead of loathing them. But if that’s really the case, I’m happy to stay this way for more such adventures, for I feel the reward outweighs whatever drawback these experiences might have had on me.

Salary and Perks

In India, tech startups pay quite decently, especially if you’re in a tech or product role. Many have no official vacation policy so you can negotiate a vacation at any time. Many aspects of the job are flexible (see flexibility above). If it is a small company, you can except fewer perks (maybe just an annual bonus). As the size of the startup goes on increasing, the perks and salary increases. Note that I’m not talking about huge multinationals here which are notorious for paying very little and overworking their employees.

While how much you should earn is very subjective, there are many websites (for example) which will give you a range if you provide them with your details (like your education, skills and city). If you’re unsure about what you should get paid, these websites can help.

But note that monetary compensation is only one of the many ways you get paid at a job. Your happiness, professional growth, the network you’re building and the value your current work has on your career in the long run are some of the other currencies that you can take into account.

Caveats

While this article might have pushed you in the direction of thinking that working at a startup is without its downsides, that’s not true. Like many things in life, it isn’t binary and definitely not a black-white choice. For example, large multinational corporations would offer you more job security than a typical early-stage startup (this is less true than it used to, as I keep hearing about ‘layoffs’ in large companies in the news, but still a point to consider).

Similarly, if your goal is to make a decent sum of money, but while living as chill a life as possible (for example, maybe your priorities are your social life, family, living in your home city, less workload and responsibilities etc), then the startup life might not be the best fit for you.

With regards to finance, it should be noted that a ‘startup’ is a company trying to make money through various means (like investor funding, sales of their product etc) and things don’t always work out as per plans. In fact, a quick web search revealed that around 75-90% of all startups fail. What this means is that salaries can get delayed, extra workload if new resources cannot be hired, low enthusiasm of the team because of the previous two and many such problems. When considering a company, look for their funding status to get an idea about how they stand financially (Crunchbase is a good place to research). Glassdoor reviews and a simple internet search can also yield a lot of information that would help you in making the right decision.

Having a short interview with the founders is a good way to get to know the long-term vision of the company and the direction things are heading. Similarly, interviewing with the manager of the team that you’ve applied to (although not always an option) is a good way to see if you’d enjoy working in their team.

In Closing

Finally, don’t take it too seriously. Remember to learn and have fun, make new friends and visit new places. One thing I can guarantee you is that almost everyone you meet will have some interesting experience and important lessons that you can use in your life. Cross-pollination of ideas from one context to another is important, and that happens not just in business meetings but over lunch and coffee breaks. I hope you found this article useful. If you wish to talk about your startup adventure, or you’re looking forward to your first, feel free to drop me an email.

Thank you for reading!

So today is my last day here at LaughGuru, my first company. I might still be working with them after this point, but most of the active development would stop and the role of the tech-team will be reduced to just maintenance of existing systems and the like. My plans for the time after my dose of Laughter Guru is still away from total clarity, so won’t really write them here. What I do have some clarity on is how I spent the three quarters of my last year as, and that is what I’ll write on in this little post.

The journey to LaughGuru

Around this time last year, my final sems were in progress. I had no job in hand (that was a thing in the final year, everyone asked everyone else if they had a job. I used to called myself berozgaar, and that is what I’ll call myself from tomorrow). I had some direction, but nothing in particular. My friend Abhishek was my gateway to the world of startups, because I knew of none and planning the future wasn’t my strongest game. So borrowing his experience and startup wisdom, I made a little list of companies that I could apply to and look forward to spending some good time learning and building software and making new friends. Those were literally my only criteria when selecting the organizations that I was going to write to. One of them was LaughGuru, the company Abhishek was then working for.

I wrote an email to the co-founder of the company sometime in mid-May. The communication was initiated through Abhishek, and I was effectively an ’employee referred’ candidate. The conversation went well, and I learned that this person is also the product and engineering manager at the company. He seemed nice. I learned that I’ll be working with ReactJS and the formal interview will start sometime after my exams were done. In the meanwhile, I also spoke with other companies that I knew of then, and most of the experience was pleasant. The people I spoke to were interesting, were open to the idea of accepting a college fresher into their teams and in general open to helping. While the entire experience was intimidating, and the idea of talking about yourself and your ‘achievements’ in front of (some very successful) people was not something I was very comfortable with (but yeah, on this blog it is okay :P), in hindsight it was a great experience into the startup world. Most importantly, I learned that getting a job at some startup is very easy. Getting a good job, at some good startup? That’s the trick.

After my exams and after some really interesting adventures on Indian roads, I got back to the business of adulthood. The company gave me an assignment, which was an interactive card game. The challenging bit was that it had to be implemented in ReactJS that I had little idea about until then. I made a decent looking version of it in around 4 days and the call for interview round 1 came sometime after that. I’m not sure about the type of that interview, but there was a mix of questions, technical and the others. It lasted some two-two and a half hours, and went well. I felt comfortable with the team, and while they seemed like nice people in general, it definitely didn’t seem like a place full of elite programmers working extra hard to bring something of a dream to reality (that is how I naively imagined startups to be like).

A week later, my second on-site interview round was conducted. This time the frontend lead was present, with whom I would be working if I get selected. The second round was much more casual than the first, and not many technical questions were asked. We spoke about my personal projects a bit and then for sometime about the technical assignment. It didn’t last very long, and the casualness of round two meant either very good or very bad news. Couple of days later, I received a call from the company and they had decided to offer me a job. I was happy. We negotiated on the offer a bit, and then I bought a day’s time to think. Not just think but I also had other interviews in progress that I had to close if I was going to take the offer up. Did that and I accepted LaughGuru’s offer. The offer date was not announced then, but I was okay with it. It was supposed to be, as some people described it, my last big vacation (which turned out to not be very true, or at least not as scary as it sounds). After the interview, I waited for another two months for the job to start. I used that time to explore my deeper interests, work on some good projects, read books about my newly found interest in cryptographic engineering and spend some good time at home in general.

Joining LaughGuru – Initial Impressions

My first day at LaughGuru was filled with mixed feelings. It wasn’t all scary as was my first day at Samagra. Back then, I didn’t know what was expected of me, and if I’ll be able to live up to the expectations of my mentors and friends. This time, there was no such feeling. I knew I was hired to write Javascript, build frontends, collaborate with an even more experienced developer and hence, I had a clear idea of what I had gotten myself into. I was not a hundred percent happy, and that was because of the sinking feeling of adulthood starting, that I was into frontend engineering which wasn’t a long term interest of mine (nor did I plan on making it that) and just plain dejection that the long vacation was over and I’ll no longer be able to spend time on the things that I wanted to. All of that aside, the day went okay, and they gave me company email accounts and added me to the comms channels. It felt good.

Since I had worked a bit before this, I couldn’t help but notice the contrasts in the way both the companies and their people operated. I missed the ‘hello’s and ‘good morning’s when people came into the office everyday wearing a wide smile, lunch sharing, office hangouts and town halls, a family like environment and a CEO who actually speaks to you and hears you. On the plus side, I was working in an actual ‘tech team’ with people who knew more about most things than me, although people weren’t into tech, I could have decent technical conversations, learn about patterns and best practices and more. The ‘working in a tech startup’ dream had become a reality and I was naturally happy about it.

Given that the company wasn’t very fast paced and our manager was very considerate about deadlines, the work load was very low. Due to that, I could do quite a few things on the side, read after coming back home and the weekends were entirely free (I only had to work during the weekends during my last couple of weeks). I managed to squeeze enough time to learn Haskell, build a nice speaker, write on this blog regularly, learn applied cryptography and implement algorithms, read books and travel to some extent (Jagriti Yatra was during this time). Another perks of working for LaughGuru (or any tech startup in general) is, you get paid decently well. And when you get paid well, you can buy time with it (I got myself a nice house close to the office to ease commute), or service some of your expensive hobbies and interests (a paid VPN and email provider, a fancy laptop, lots of paperback books etc).

Last 4 Months

So after the initial month’s dust settled and things started to become natural to me, I started to enjoy my job a lot more. The work that I did (mostly writing ReactJS and lots of CSS which I had recently picked up) had become second nature to me, and as a result I could put in more thought about what I was doing, why I was doing what I was doing, asking questions and learning things from a product and even business perspective rather than just the frontend or tech perspective which I did in the initial months. Along with the work part, I was also hanging out with my office friends, seeing and learning things outside of tech, hanging out at nice places and exchanging stories. Due to a weird turn of events, the frontend lead (whom I used to report) and Abhishek (my friend who had referred me to LaughGuru) had to leave the company. It was not a very happy time for me, for I was very close with both of these people and had become very comfortable with having them around. Guess it is part of being in a professional setting, people come and go.

Things were different after that, not necessarily better or worse. I was reporting directly to the manager (also the product guy). He gave me all the product ‘gyaan’ that he had accumulated over the years, we discussed tech during work and checked out other company’s products and borrowed inspiration from them. Since I was the only person on the frontend of our product, I had to put in some thinking before jumping into code, and that was a very important lesson that I knew I needed to learn. Towards the end of my time at LaughGuru, I was doing more thinking about how to implement a feature, the data flow, handling edge cases and basic optimization than I was actually coding. I had also simultaneously read the novel ‘The Mythical Man Month’ and was realizing its importance.

Our manager was a very smart guy and quite friendly. Another one of my colleagues, the person who took care of the content, had also become a good friend. I would really miss the nice lunch and coffee conversations with these two. Both of them were math, history and science nerds, and it was always fun to listen to them talk. I went to a star gazing session with one of them, and a mid night cycling event earlier in the year and it was very cool hanging out with them. Will definitely miss that as well.

Closing the LaughGuru Chapter

While the departure of my friends was heartbreaking, I had decided to continue my work on the awesome product that we were building, especially now that I was in total control of the codebase of the frontend. It was delightful to see the frontend take shape and become usable as each day passed. We were building a lot of new features, and I felt extremely proud to be able to deliver them end to end. It was similar to my time in Samagra where I would get to build the entire projects end to end, only here I was much more mature. Because of all of this, or maybe not because of it but because of my own sluggishness, my personal studies were taking a hit. I wasn’t making much progress in that direction.

It was sometime during March that I found the time I gave to my personal studies inadequate. I also had a very clear understanding that nows the time to experiment and risk it for a dream, and it will only get harder the longer I wait. Talking to some people and thinking thoroughly about this, I told my manager that I needed time to study and hence I’d be discontinuing (at least full time) with my role as an engineer at this organization. The discussions that followed lead to this day today and all of it sailed very smoothly. Last few weeks were very busy; vacating my rented flat, working to get the product in decent shape, the nostalgia of my amazing time spent here and the anticipation for a brighter future filled with happiness. I’ll be unemployed again soon, will look for a way to sustain myself but most importantly, do something that I’ll never get tired of doing. That’s the simple end goal here.

Good Experiences & Learnings

I think working with some very smart people has been the best part of the experience. It gives you a benchmark to look up to with regards to everything, from books to humor. You learn a lot in the everyday conversations, the occasional outings and the way they work. That was one thing I couldn’t do sitting at home (I would’ve anyway written code or learned a new technology, so that’s not something particular to LaughGuru). I read some really nice books and articles thanks to my colleagues. My understanding of tech products has matured a lot during the last couple of months, and I think this will come in handy for my personal projects.

One thing that I’m proud of learning in tech is CSS. This is genuinely something that I wouldn’t have learned if not for LaughGuru. As a result, I’m writing it here. CSS is already coming in handy at many places. From fixing random things on my blog, to the other websites that I manage, to even modifying some random theme’s stylesheets found on the Internet to suit my requirements. The CSS I wrote at LaughGuru was strictly mobile responsive, was interactive and used many of the newer CSS3 semantics. Now, because of that, writing a much simpler static blog’s CSS feels quite easy (not talking about this one. Obviously). Learning CSS, maybe not the most pleasant thing, was, in hindsight, a great investment of my time.

Before joining LaughGuru, I scored myself a solid 8 out of 10 for Javascript. But then, I learned so much more here, from service workers, caching, index DB, shadow dom, es6 and 7, abstraction for Javascript components (the OO way), the list goes on and on. Now I’ll hardly score myself a 6, because I’m pretty sure the more I dig, the more there will be to learn and it is in my best interest to stay modest, haha!

I’ve made some friends here. Not just here, but at every place I’ve interacted for the job, I made a conscious effort to be nice and likable (how well that went, I can’t tell), tech can come in second. I was horrible with my social skills in junior college. Things changed a bit in engineering, but I still was around a select few, not interacting much (if at all) with the rest of the class. This time, I made it a point to speak out honestly what I thought, and not just to the few friends. It has been successful so far, and no one has called me a weirdo yet. The Jagriti Yatra really helped me in this regard, and boasted my confidence on many fronts, most important of which was that even if you take the tech out of the conversation, I can still keep the chat going and not disseminate into silence.

Useful Lessons Learned

I’ve learned some lessons during my time here at LaughGuru, some of them the hard way. I’ll start with the one I personally felt very good after learning. It was about the way of the society. For the better part of teenage and until the end of engineering, I always did whatever I did with computers for myself, for the fun and satisfaction. Then suddenly, I got into this fast paced world of startups where your career came before anything and growing professionally was of prime importance; where you become your job description, and I became a React engineer. I had almost fallen for this, taken this to be what adulthood was meant to be. But I am so glad I was wrong. And I decided to again go back to the basics, to doing things that I enjoyed doing. I don’t know how this will turn out, but at least I’ll be happy.

I learned that one has to be smart, not academic but the street smart. While people in general are nice, occasionally you’ll find someone who’s just there to use you. And that is fine while you get a fair return (rewarded in some way), but not without that. There will be people who take the word ‘resource’ a bit too literally and act that way. The important bit for me was realizing that I’m dealing with such a person and taking control of the situation. It is funny how I’ve read about the paranoid mindset all the time in the infosec world, and it seems obvious there, but I had to ‘learn’ it separately when it came to people and the world outside computers.

I learned how powerful negativity is, and how important it is to distance oneself from such forces. Negativity around you is never healthy, and in a profession where your job is to think, plan and create, negativity is a disaster for productivity.

Things To Look Forward To

While LaughGuru was a great place to be at, there are some things I really look forward to for my next gig. First, given my interests, I’ll try to find a job at a place that understands and encourages free software, and that the work I’ll be doing will be open for the world to see. ‘Open Source’ started as just a word for me, then it quickly became an idea that I’d want to be part of sometime in the distant future, and now after working for a for-profit startup and writing proprietary code (which I honestly believe is a perfectly valid thing to do), I realized how integral had the idea of writing free software become to me. For this reason, I’ll try to find a place where I’ll fit ideologically just as well as technically and socially.

I look forward to working for an organization where the chief(s) officers are in touch with the employees and have conversations with them regularly. I feel this is important to the entire growth feedback loop, growth for the organization as well as the employee. This, unfortunately, never happened at LaughGuru. I saw the CEO for the first time three months into my time at his company and as far as I can remember, we never had a meaningful conversation during my time there. Maybe I could’ve tried more, or maybe I need to work on my communication skills more. I’m sure there must’ve been good reasons for that (the obvious one being I simply wasn’t important enough). Whatever might’ve been the reason, that’s past, and for the future I’ll see to it that I have a conversation with the chiefs of the organization before joining and get to know them (I realize that it isn’t feasible for even the slightly larger organizations, let alone the medium to big ones, but I think it is a good personal objective to have).

Money is the root of many evils that happen in an organization. Delayed salaries, pending bonuses, unmet commitments regarding finances and many such things lead to decay of trust between an employee and employer, however good the other relations are, and that is really unfortunate. One thing I’ve realized here is that speaking out the truth upfront rather than giving away excuse after excuse can save quite a few things to both the parties. Going out of business will inevitably happen to many, if not most companies. It is how the situation is handled by the employee and the employer that makes the difference. And I look forward to seeing better ways of that being done.

In Closing

There’s so much more to write, but one can never fully express eight good months of adventures, learning and building through a little blog post, can one? I hope you found this article interesting. If you have any comments, feel free to write them to me at my email address. Thank you for reading.

I’ve not stayed away from home during college to experience the hostel life, so I never learnt what it was like to go back home after a long time, the ‘ghar ja raha hu’ feeling. What makes one house our home and the other just a place we live in. Why do we get attached to some walls and a roof more than the others that we stay in. What makes some immaterial things more dear to us than others. I was randomly wondering about these little things in the past couple of weeks. Why?

Around 3 months ago, I moved away from home, to this new place. It eased my commute to work. But it was still just a place away from home where I was residing, paying rent in return, not really home. How does one turn such a shelter into something we call home? What makes a home? From my experience so far at this place, the memories are what gives everything a personal touch. Four walls and a roof don’t make a place home. The people visiting you, the moments lived in it, both good and bad, are what creates memories out of nothing. These memories get tied to these four walls. The way data gets tied to a unique entity via a foreign key, our memories get tied to a place, time, to people, to emotions. That’s why college is special. Not for what you gain there, but it is a place for many of our most memorable events.

I had my college friends come over yesterday. There was a lot of chaos as one would expect with a bunch of loud people packed into my little apartment. There were jokes, laughter, swearing, music, planning, silence and lots of other things that we associate with life. Similarly, I have my parents over today. My life becomes very comfortable when Mom and Dad come over as I get good food and snacks right in my hands all day long. Not something I’m very proud of, before you point it out.

Once you have regular visitors to your place, you try to keep it decently clean, organized and keep essential food handy. It isn’t just a place you reside any more, it is your home. You take care of it the same way you care for your real home. You wear a smile when you leave the house, you greet the neighbours and the security guard. Slowly, the brain starts to think of it as that comfy place you go to after a tiring day, home.

I miss my real home, but not as much as I would have if I had not accepted this as my second home. Mom asked me yesterday, ‘What will you do after the contract for this house expires?’, and I didn’t have an answer. Sometimes, things feel so permanent that we don’t think about being without them, and then suddenly, just at the thought of having to let something go, you realize the amount of love you have for it. That finally brings me to this thing of getting attached to non living things. ‘How could you name your things?’ I get asked for personifying my laptop, my car and many other things that are dear to me. I haven’t got the slightest regret for my affection towards these ‘things’, after all, they’ve made me, just like the real people have.

Thank you for reading.

Yesterday, it was my Parallel & Distributed Systems exam. The last of the 4 subjects for this semester, which itself was last of the 8 semester we have in an Engineering degree course. Which is to say that Engineering is finally over. I am pretty dense about most things outside of computers, but even for someone like me, realization of the fact that a very cheerful phase of my life has now come to an end, it was a bit difficult to take in.

I remember the first day of my engineering, the same way I remember the first day of my junior college. Both my junior college and degree college were far away from home (60kms each side), and I selected them purposely. I liked cities from a very tender age, and selecting a college in a city quenched that thirst for me. Cities are quite fascinating, especially due to the fact that I come from a sub-suburban town that closed its shops by 8 at night. On my first day, I was clueless, just like others. I didn’t know that in each semester we were going to have different subjects. Like most others, I had not one friend. I looked up my name on a board and went to the classroom it mentioned. I made my first friend in the Chemistry lab on the 11th floor, and that guy stayed my best friend throughout college, which is nice. Made quite a few friends in Engineering, as opposed to junior college, which is a huge improvement in my social skills.

Love for technology

I choose computer engineering (after realizing that computer science is not an option for the academically dull kids), and I got the college seat in the third and final round of admissions. If that wouldn’t have happened, I had planned for BSc, because I wanted to study Physics as well. During admissions, I knew computers was my first preference. I had already been into computers from 2-3 years then. Didn’t know how to write any code as such, but I did have a good idea of what I’m getting myself into, given my interests in Netsec from sometime then. I knew stuff back then, and I remember the cyber wars time. I wanted to be more than a guy who used exploits and php shells, I wanted to be the one writing them (Arjun, thank you for inspiring). I was so crazy about cybersec back then, that I managed to get promoted with grace marks in 11th standard.

One of the most interesting difference between junior college and engineering was that in junior college, people (except Kunal, who liked tech) around me thought I was crazy, because talking about webservers, exploits and sql injection was something that would turn me on. On the other hand, things were different in Engineering. I had a friend or two who used to understand what I’m up to, were equally fanatics about something in computers, and shared the same passion for programming and solving problems. Suddenly, I wasn’t weird. Thanks to landing in the right place, where I think I belonged.

I got into blogging just the day after my last HSC exam if I remember well. The original plan was to make money, but the end result was that it taught me a lot about tech in general. It taught me things related to web hosting, numerous CMSs that I used back then, I played with my first VPS around this time. And to match the OS on the VPS, I started using CentOS on my PC too. It was then I learnt how multiple sites get hosted from a single IP address. How SEO is done and how affiliate marketing hows. None of that actually made me any money, but the foundation it gave me was later used when I later got into web development. It is a great feeling when you’re writing PHP code and then suddenly you exclaim, “Oh, so this is how SQL injection actually works. Cool!”. Although nothing can beat the feeling of writing AJAX for the first time to retrieve data from a remote REST endpoint. I was so excited, I even called my mom to show it to her. “Arre waah, chaan! (Oh wow, nice)” is all she said. Never mind.

I got into competitive programming in my first year. We were taught C, and I and my friend had just discovered Hacker Earth back then through our seniors. Not much later, I realized that I can save myself a lot of efforts if I knew how to code a second language. Thus came Python. I did some competitive coding with it, but my interest quickly shifted to learning Django, which was this cool thing that looked like a CMS but wasn’t a CMS. People called it a “framework”. Now what on earth was that? And what is this MVC thing? Can’t we all stick to simpler things like writing SQL queries in PHP files and echoing HTML though them? Why need all this complexity.

But wrong I was all this time. Models had to be separated from views and then you can focus more on what mattered, and less on struggling with the structure of your own code. During my time with C and Python, I wrote a some comparison articles because it was fascinating to me how different both these technologies were.

Then I fell in love PHP, and then C++ which was when I tried getting back to competitive programming. I had given Debian Wheezy a try then. Soon I read about the launch of Jessie. I came across this meet-up announcement about Jessie’s launch party. I attended it, which was the first meet-up that I had attended. Although I went there purely for the Debian launch party and getting my hands on the ISO, the outcome was that I got to hear people talk about various other things, real web development being one of them, and it was amazing.

In 3rd year, we had web technologies as a subject. It was when I got to learn Javascript properly. I knew it from as long as I had used the Internet, but never really understood it, or the power it had. I learned it in depth, and found a new love. I used Js to write most of my projects, and I really owe a lot of my current skills to that little decision of not just learning Js, but understanding it under the hood.

Towards the second half of the 3rd year, I got involved with Project Lumos, another life changing experience for me. Then things got pretty busy, and final year came and went without much happening from a technological learnings point of view.

Travel

I traveled a lot more than what I was known for before engineering. I watched movies in theaters, went to good restaurants, had fun with nice people who actually cared about me. I even went on my first trip with friends out of state, which was in Uttarakhand. I have learned tonnes of social skills through some of these people around me, and during my time in Delhi, I learned how much do these social skills and people skills matter. In fact, your technical skills sometimes come second to these people skills. “In a way, life is what but the relationships you build along the way”, a person I respect a lot said once.

Misc

Apart from that, I got to speak a lot in front of people, in class, during Project Lumos meetings, in the committee that I was a part of, etc. Since I never spoke publicly, I had a fear of doing it. I got over it during engineering, which is a great thing. Expressing your thoughts in clear words in a skill very few actually have, and while I’m not there yet, I’ve made a start towards it. I learned to stay organized, use notes, reminders and other stuff. I have tried to actively help my friends and classmates with their stuff. Helping others have given me great deal of satisfaction, and while it may not translate to anything, it surely helped me get my own foundations and concepts right, which is a byproduct of teaching.

Most people and their opinion don’t matter. I realized that there’s a very little group of people around you whom you should never let down. Don’t waste time impressing the rest. I learnt I’m missing on some good experiences by always caring about what people might think. Once I let go of it, life was even more colorful.

A great deal of all of this people skills have come from the book by Dale Carnegie, How to win friends and influence people. A no BS book that I would totally recommend to each and every person reading this, irrespective of your field of work, given all of us share the same Human abstract class.

What I could’ve done better

Now that I know what mattered more than most other things, I think if I were to take up admission in engineering again, there are a few things I would do differently. I think a lot of unnecessary emphasis is given to academic excellence when actually, it was the least that mattered. I think I’ve spent a lot of time studying for exams when I could’ve studied to gain actual practical knowledge by building projects. I mean, reading from those question papers, studying answers from the point of view of scoring marks is time that went down the drain. Optimizing your time best to get the essence of the subject, some practical exposure as well as a score just enough to keep you going, that is what I would do the next time.

I would talk to more people, send more emails. I had always been hesitant to talk to people from startups and organizations that I loved. I felt I was under-qualified for most of the things people do in tech. Although, not properly qualified either, but if you just assume that and don’t reach out to people, you’ll never move to the next level. For starters, suppose you learnt Python this semester, and you are confident enough to work on a project. Start contacting people and ask them if you have a way to contribute to their project. That way, you can get a part time role over the semester vacation at a good place, and get to do things professionally.

Make open source contributions. If you don’t feel like working as an intern, contribute to open source. I’m amazed at how much I overestimated open source and thought that getting into it is too big a deal. No it isn’t. If you know what you’re doing, just pick up a tool that you use (say Chromium), look into their bug trackers and write a patch for a bug that you can understand and solve. Then compare it to the accepted patch. When I did it, I was surprised to find that the solution that I wrote (which I thought was ‘unprofessional, inefficient and too simple’) was exactly what the solution which was accepted was. The message here is, you’re not as stupid as you might think, and the people who build all the amazing stuff that you can’t live without a single day were not any smarter than you are. Know basic Javascript, Python or C++? Any one? Great, you can officially ‘author’ some part of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Know how to write a language fluently? You can write documentation for them. It’s that easy.

Make connections. Connections are just people you know, whom you can call up and ask for a favor. Your friend is your hangouts connection. Similarly, get to know people in various walks of life, in different fields. It is a win win in most cases for you and your connection. Share with them any opportunity that you find useful, and they would do the same. Plus, it is almost always the case that they know more about something than you do, and can guide you on that. They can validate your skills both professionally and personally. Connections are also useful when you want to make new connections. Some of your connections would be a lot ahead of you in professional life. They might know more about most things than you. Have them as mentors. You’ll avoid some common mistakes and save time if you have a good mentor.

Eat healthy and workout regularly. I’ve realized it a little late, but you only have one body that you have to live with for the next 40, 50, 60 or 70 years. And it isn’t indestructible. There are some irreversible changes taking place while you’re sitting there reading this. Your spine takes a lot of beating when you sit, and if you’re a computer person who sits most of the day in front of his or her PC, then the spine cries. Make sure you have a right posture when working. I know people who use a Rs. 70,000 laptop but use a crappy chair as it ‘doesn’t matter’. It does, so let’s stop taking our bodies for granted. Eat less sugary food and workout regularly, if not daily. If nothing, go for a 5km walk everyday. You’ll feel much better when you come back to work. We programmers are very keen to watch log files, warning and error messages. But we often ignore the warning messages our body tries to give us, and by the time you encounter your first error, it is irreversible. Don’t let that happen.

Drink plenty of water. I know, very trivial. But surprising how many of my fellow engineers and programmers forget to drink water when they’re working on some interesting problem. Sure, work hard, but keep a water bottle close to you and have a sip every now and then. It will benefit in ways you can’t even imagine. Make it a habit. I have done it, and it really helps keep you hydrated and fresh.

Learn to judge people. Not everyone who might ask you for a favor might actually deserve it. During our projects, I have helped all kinds of people. Later when I used to think, not all of them were into learning how to do things. Most of them just wanted me to get their work done for them. People will befriend you when they see a merit in it, that’s just life. Don’t be ignorant of it. If you still choose to help, cheers!

Finally

I hope some of you will find something to learn from my experiences. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve learnt from some. There’s still a lot to learn, so many amazing people to meet and places to explore. One life, too short and too long the way you see it. I’ve been privileged and fortunate enough to have so many positive experiences during my time in engineering. As an engineer, I feel the learning phase of my life would never end, but this particular one, of formal education, has ended here, at least for now. Life would turn off the ‘easy’ level switch for me, and that’s scary enough. But at the same time, new opportunities, freedom to take major decisions and new responsibilities will become part of my life in this new phase. It should be pretty interesting.

So this little thread to the 18 years of education my parents gave me, the people I met and became friends with and to all the amazing experiences, learnings and setbacks, that molded me into the person I am today. Thank you for reading.