I started my journey of programming in anything other than C/C++ way back in 2013. At the time I had terrible knowledge of git, formatting in general, markdown was a really foreign thing and I was not comfortable getting my hands dirty with different programming languages without “learning” the language itself first. I however, was one to experiment and even though I had a real bad artistic sense, I do like to think I had a decent sense of aesthetics. I was good at critiquing what I did not like, but was not that good at creating aesthetic displays myself(still bad at that). All this experimentation with programming langauges and different themes might make this the seventh or eight static site genreator that I’ve used to re-design this site, most of them came and went without a single post written on them. GSoC 2016 might’ve been the only time I made a quater-decent attempt at blogging and that was because it was the only acceptable format of weekly report delivery at the PSF.
In the beginning I was really inspired by the “edgy” writing style of blogs that I used to read and was particularly inspired by the archetypical overly-opinionated programmer who thinks very highly of himself on the internet, because which teenager isn’t. Add to that the fact that I practically idolized Linus Torvalds and his over the top antics and we get an overconfident teenager who of course shouldn’t be taken seriously. Over time I learnt that these things are public and not a good look to future employers when I saw sections in job applications to link my website. There’s also the part when now I’m seven years older and (maybe) wiser so I understand being respectful of people, their opinions even when you think they’re not worth anything or in other words “tact” is a desirable virtue. Working with some really good senior engineers that I respect and are anywhere from 15-25 years older than me added to this journey of developing humility and the understanding that rants without solutions are worth zilch. In $current_year, you can actively seek and find people to reinforce your views on social media and finding problems with every aspect of the system. Seldom do you find any of those posts containing an actual solution. An example would be a blanket statement “the hiring process is broken” which is nothing but a failure in self-reflection and a shift of blame for one’s own shortcomings, and you’ll find a million people like yourself echoing the sentiment online but I digress.
The point is, most of what I wrote in my free time over the years was not publishing worthy and everything else I wrote, I wrote because I was paid or forced to write it. Until now when I discovered that blogging/writing posts isn’t a hobby anymore, or something that I should do when I actually want to share something with the world. In my line of work and in my peer group it’s practically a bare-minimum requirement. I’ve had things to share in the past, but I’ve had neither the will, time or energy to write about them. I submitted to conferences a couple of times but the will for that too, died as soon as it arose. Through my entire journey of “practical thinking” the one thing I never grasped properly is that “if you build it, they’ll come” is an unreasonable ask from anybody, why would anybody bother with you specifically when there’s thousands like you everywhere? It’s nobody’s job to actively seek you out(well maybe recruiters but whatever). Build it, promote it, share it and they might come, even when the “it” is your own knowledge. This, I understood when I learnt a thing or two about markets and economics.
With that change in philosophy and a reluctance to move over to Medium, I decided for the nth time to re-design my site. This time I needed something that could double up as portfolio and blog site so it’s convenient for poeple to “google me”. I really liked this theme and in my career spanning four years in “industry work experience” and about six years of paid work otherwise, I have developed a decent understanding of CI/CD, Golang and everything else that goes into the development of this really simple site. I learnt Golang back in 2019 because we did a year long project so Hugo seemed like a decent enough choice. I know enough of it to edit any source code and TBH I’ve always hated Ruby and Jekyll, I only used it whenever I did because either my friends did or for Jekyll’s default theme that I really liked. There was also Wintersmith but eh, it too was too much of a Hassle. I had tried Nikola but it had too much of a learning curve. At the end of the day, none of that matters as long as this blog actually gets some decent posts on here.
So ending my first small blog post in over four years, this time I actually have
content to post because, as it turns out it might as well be one of the
written commandments of the church of technology- thou shall share and document what you
learn. I recently learnt it even says that in my job description at Red Hat lol.
I’m currently working on Time Series analysis using R for a certain
project and recently learnt how to use ggplot2. Now do I really like R? Nah,
still a Python guy through and through but I’m not somebody to not use the right
tool for a job owing to certain biases. I’m going to document my ggplot2
adventures this weekend just because, and my work with transformers and what I
learnt on the one after.
I’m not sharing this post on Twitter or anywhere else for that matter because this isn’t the kind of post I really want widespread attention on since this is supposed to be a technical blog and if I start writing philosophy I can fill full pages and books. But if for some reason somebody’s reading this somehow thanks for staying tuned this far. Hope you actually enjoy the content that I put out. I might think about x-posting to Medium in some way because that’s where all the cool kids are and this site is like using Facebook in the era of Snapchat and Instagram, but well I don’t like Snapchat and Instagram. There are some things for which I’m too much of a luddite to catch on to, not having full control over the design of my own website is one of them.