Here’s a rant about—life, exams, FOSS stuff & the tangled mess that my uni courses have become
For the past four months or so — I’ve been juggling university coursework, restarting social-media (ahem Instagram); attending hackathons and meeting new people at college. I have not really managed my time well. I wanted to re-start my YouTube channel, manage my time better and was seeking to be more independent. I have really become self-aware of the choices I have borne.
So here’s my 2023 in review!
It was a bit chaotic, to say the least. Let me walk you through
I have an itch to put to use, the stuff I am learning via the courses taught at college. For example: in December as a part of our Python course a we made a mini-project—a small typing-speed test, à la monkeytype but written in Python.
But this wasn’t driven by passion or solved a real world problem, it was just
coursework. But hey it’s something that will stick around for some time,
you feel happy working on it, rather than—memorizing all your Jacobian
recurrance-relations, Quantum Mechanics derivations or the parts of a lathe
machine without ever seeing or using one in real life ~T_T~
I gave my first-talk at college </HSP>
The HSP Project Expo was pretty interesting, met many new people & awkwardly–it served as a good conversation starter. A handful of people after the event got over reached out to me, when I got back to hostel—I showcased a small demo. (the cursed WiFi didn’t help at all tho!!)
So we talked about our past projects and other cool tech-stuff.
Shoutouts!
Speaking of which, I really need to showcase a bunch of people who’ve inspired me and bounce ideas back and forth. I am really greatful for the people I have met in college and some in school back in January 23’ This probably needs a post of its own but do check their projects / websites out!
Aayan, Adhesh, Aditya, Advaith, Anirudh, Anshul, Anupam, Jeel, Kaushal, Krish, Naveen, Navneet, Nikhil @heftymouse, Nilay, Prachi, Rithul, Sanidhya, Shreehari, Takshak, Tanmayee, Tejas
And yes, these are all first years!
I’ve been swayed by the people I surround myself with (both in good and bad ways;) I have broken some of the constraints that I had set 3-4 years ago. i.e: I deleted almost all my centralized social-media accounts.
But, I started using Instagram again, later in November 🤦 that decision for one, has spiraled and now turned into a time sink. Nikhil has a good post that I reason with. I don’t think I went overboard; but I’m not proud that I clock an average of 5hrs of screentime doom-scrolling reels every week. Don’t worry, I still am on the fediverse and will probably delete Instagram unless I’m posting a story.
Hackathons
I took part in 2 overnight hackathons this year: pictured above is GDSC’s Override. Second was Hacknight 5.0 — celeberating Hacktoberfest yes, the Digital Ocean one! You get to solve issues on some open-source projects and earn bounty points as close issues assigned on a git repo.
I met a lot of wonderful people, I remember having a bad sore throat for the entire next week. But it was worth it!
a new-core memory
Also, these cute squeeky duckies from override—which we mortally destroyed tossing it around, playing badminton in the quadrangle the next day 💀
It was really fun staying up all night, playing TT, lounging on beanbags, playing carrom, craving mid-night snacks on campus and sipping black coffee (I owe you one Rithul!). And vibing with seniors dancing to Bohemian Raphsody. (I really need to find that video!!)
Harsh droppin’ them beats
It was in October, after my first sem-exams, when I realized — most of first-year courses to me, is pretty boring. There, I said it! (sans the free-time you get). It is mostly a repeat of 11th and 12th grade and you are just made to memorize a bunch of theorems, recycle it, and write on paper. Make sure you forget it after the end-sem exam, because you still have another chem cycle semester ahead of you!
ISFCR_{C@pTUr3tH3Fl@G}
September 2nd: This was officially, the first event I took part in this year! I placed 6th out of 200 or so teams which took part that day. I even got a smol cash prize
P.S. Notice the typo in the IP address octant! (01)
Before you ask me, I am not in the photo because only the top 3 teams get a photo with the hugeass cheque anol :/
I feel I am buried under a mountain of unfinished tasks
Most of what I have built this year were projects I had pursued before I joined college in August: Perhaps engineering courses were always meant to be this way; I shouldn’t be expecting any sort of drastic change from my school days. This is a deadweight I just need to get over with!
polarhive.net/git
These are tools I’ve been building that I wanted to use myself and solved real-problems. I feel I have not built enough, or the commits I made were trivial. Let me know if you have some ideas that I can help build / solve.
- jukebox: play LastFM music recommendations using: mpd, yt-dlp and bash without opening a browser
- arceo: a blocklist against consumerism
- pasta: a pastebin written in go
- vulpes: minimal firefox userjs
- lava: this site’s hugo theme
- Ammachi’s Kathas a collection of malayalam short-stories (audiobook)
A vacation after the exams
July: I packed up, I got a well deserved break which I have already documented here /summer
In June I went back to school, met some of my closest friends
Met some of my highschool teachers too, I’m still surpirsed they remember us, and it was lunch time so we couldn’t miss Babu uncle’s kebab, felt like 2018
Shared a good icecream cornerhouse and called it a day!
Some more diesel-posting and I’ll leave you with beautiful sunsets shot in February
Shuttling around the city, giving entrance-exams
March and April were so packed!
As promised, a sunset in February
Surprise, it’s January, Graduation day — A week before JEE
The long road ahead
As my dad would say — “It’s about finding the balance–and understanding the process as early as possible”
I regret not taking heed; much earlier. I had a great year so far. I would need
a lot of pushing and I promise to the 10 or so people still reading my blog in
2024 I will post more updates here >,..,<
Just kidding: I’ve been hitting almost 3 GB in traffic this month, at least that is what Netlify tells me so (I don’t run analytics on this site). Thank you for sticking around! ~adieu