Ups & downs in 2023

Ups and downs, highs and lows, peaks and valleys, the year 2023 was a rollercoaster ride.

31-12-2023

[#life, #journal]

December

December brought forth a lot of major life changes. As with every good journey, there comes an end. I’ve wrapped up my tenure at StackIt after six fulfilling months. December serves as the last month of my journey at StackIt. I’ve had a great time working at StackIt. This team is the most hard-working, and the most talented team that I have worked with. Leaving StackIt with a heavy heart full of gratitude and memories. Meanwhile, looking forward to the next step in my career.

A couple of interns are also leaving, so we decided to go on a company trip to Gokarna. We had a great time at the beach. We went on a trek, had tons of food, and partied a lot on the beach. I’ve made a lot of friends at StackIt, and I’m going to miss them. I got to learn a lot from them, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with them. Here are the pics of the trip. We also went out for Go-karting and gaming. I had a great time with the team.

Now, I’m in transition, on the lookout for the next step in my career. The excitement and dread of embarking on a new professional journey is overwhelming. Meanwhile, I have uncovered a new pain point in the developer tooling market, and I’m working on a solution. I am planning to build something of my own.

The rollercoaster of the year 2023 is coming to an end. I am glad to be back at home taking a break. Looking back, I am proud of myself for having come this far. This year has been a crucible of growth, and I am grateful for the opportunities that I have had. Life is not a fairy tale, and I have had my fair share of ups and downs. But, with enough grit, effort, and love, you can make it the kind of movie you want it to be.

Here are some of the things that I have learnt this year, and wanted to share with you:

Work harder. Your success is almost directly proportional to the amount of work you put in.
Keep building. There is no end to learning. Growth doesn’t foster in a comfort zone.
Visual form of learning is the slowest. Reading and writing are extremely fast alternatives.
Be kinder. You never know what someone is going through.
Save. You never know when you might need it.
Take trips. Roam around. Travel. See the world. There aren’t enough places to see! (After saving, of course! :P)

The new year begins with a new job and a new hustle. I am looking forward to the next year, and I am excited to see what it has in store for me.

Happy New Year! 🎉

November

As November came to an end; with merely a month left, I looked at my resolutions for this year and wondered if I even came close to starting them. Contemplating the decisions that I took in these past eleven months, I pondered on how much I had progressed.

This year, I

Graduated College
Got a Job/ started my entrepreneurial journey
Moved to Bangalore; started living away from home
Somehow managed to make money, and send some back home; started paying my bills
Started paying taxes

By the end of this year, I want to have

built more projects
read and written more
become more fit than I was in January
built a solid plan for the next two to three years

Before beginning 2024, I want to have grown to look back at 2023 and be proud of myself; thus, I will be working on myself for the next month.

The festive season in Nov is always a busy time for us Indians. It brings forth long weekends, leaves, and holidays. Corporate folks save up leaves and vacation days to go back home and cherish the season with friends and family. I, too, went back home for this Diwali. We had a Puja at home, and I met my extended family. It was a weekend of fun and a break from my work life. I got chocolates for Sneha and got her a neck pillow. Both my sisters had their birthdays in the beginning of November, and I had to get both of them gifts.

Returning from home is always a challenge. The dreaded steps that I take on mornings when I know I have a flight to catch are the worst. This time too, I did not want to return and with each breath that I took, I wished somehow magically I wouldn’t have to leave my home, and yet I would be employed and earning a living. I had to leave, and with a heavy heart I mustered all courage inside me, and I did. Rio never gets why I have to leave. He is always by my side whenever I am in my home and tries his best to not let me leave my room. There are things that humans do that dogs do not understand, like leaving. I wish I could explain to him that I have to leave, and I will be back soon. While he knows that I will be back someday, he still makes those puppy eyes, unable to speak up or do anything, just looks at me leave. If only I could explain that leaving is a transient inevitability!

The following week was a stressful one. At Stackit, I had a lot of pending tasks on the backlog. While back at home I had to prepare for an important test. The highlight of the week was watching India go into finals in the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup. Even though I am not a sports fan, looking at my country at the top of the leaderboard, undefeated, making its way to win the finals made me proud.

Tech:

I am looking to upgrade my entire desk setup. I realized I am spending more time on my desk writing blogs and coding, thus I’m looking to invest in a mechanical keyboard, an ergonomic mouse, a comfortable chair, and a new monitor.

I have been using an HP-GK320 wired keyboard with Blue switches for a long time, which is cheap and provides an okayish experience. The Lenovo Legion gaming mouse also serves well. I’ve been eyeing a mechanical keyboard, the Ducky One 2 SF for a while, and I’m eager to experience the tactile and audible feedback they provide. I am also planning to decide on an ergonomic mouse. The Logitech MX Master 3S looks attractive but I haven’t settled on anything yet.

I was using the Acer Ed320QR monitor, which was a 32" curved monitor with a 144Hz refresh rate. However, I found the monitor to be lacking in terms of colour accuracy and resolution. I have upgraded to the LG Ultragear 32" since it supports WQHD @165Hz, has HDR10, is 99% sRGB accurate and colour calibrated.

I had gotten a cheap chair from the local market, which was initially comfortable until it broke. I tried fixing it, but it is comfortable anymore and is still somewhat faulty. I am planning to get a new chair, and I am looking at the Green Soul Zodiac Pro Series chair.

I am planning to polish up my Data Structures and Algorithms, and my profile. Looking at the current market it is evident that only the skilled ones make it to the top.

I am currently working on building an Nl2SQL engine for StackIt. A platform that can effortlessly translate natural language queries into SQL, automating the entire data extraction and analysis process. The tech behind this would involve vectorizing SQL schemas and using a multi-query engine to find the appropriate schema-embedding section to send to the LLM to generate SQL queries.

At StackIt, we have decided to have a demo pitch round each Saturday. We make presentations to show what we’ve built in the entire week. Inspired by this, a zeal to build my own presentation came rushing. Thus, I started Dough: a rich, modular, command-line tool to generate presentations written in Rust.

Meanwhile, I am planning to pick back up Bee: a command-line bit-torrent client to download torrents written in Rust. I am looking to explore esoteric programming languages and look into the interpreters. Curious about game dev, I am also looking to get my hands dirty with tactical FPS/ open-world games.

Research:

I am diving deeper into the world of AI, prompt engineering and fine-tuning LLMs to convert natural language to SQL queries. The impetus for this exploration stemmed from the shortcomings of an NL2SQL generator at StackIt, prompting a quest for a robust platform automating SQL generation from natural language queries. The model was not able to generate SQL queries for complex questions. Thus, I am trying to understand the prompt engineering behind the entire infrastructure of Lookup AI. Our strategic plan involves developing a platform that can effortlessly translate natural language queries into SQL, automating the entire data extraction and analysis process.

October

October began with a bang. I had a lot of trips planned out. Khusi had just come back from Dubai, and while returning we planned to go on a trip to Dubai together! Meanwhile, my childhood friends and I had a week-long trek planned to Kedarnath, UK. Four of us, Mukul, Hritik, Hemant, and I were going to meet in Delhi and then head to Haridwar. Read more about the trip here.

September

Settling down in Bangalore and looking forward to a new, competitive and exciting software engineering life here. The new house is lovely and living with my best friends solves more problems than I anticipated. I am trying to make out time of my schedule to play the guitar more, write more, work on my projects, and also polish up my data structures and algorithms as well. For a good part of my adulthood, I tried to avoid investments and always had my dad take care of them. Now, I have decided to learn more about stocks, investments and the pile of cash surrounding it. I aspire to be physically fit, but my appetite for junk food has spread like wildfire. I am trying to get into a routine and lose a considerable amount of weight before hitting the gym.

My current endeavours encompass a broad spectrum of technical challenges and innovations, ranging from plugin development and deployment optimization to AI-driven solutions that promise to transform the way we interact with data.

Engaged with StackIt, I am working with Google AppScript, React, and Nodejs to build the StackIt Plugin. Our primary focus is on seamlessly integrating a payment infrastructure into the plugin.

Dealing with Google AppScript has proven somewhat challenging. The documentation is not that great and the community is not active. Meanwhile, within the cloud platform, our objective is to establish a clear demarcation between production, pre-production, and development environments for our plugin. We use Docker to create containers for each of us developers and separate virtual machines for each of the environments. Our current hurdle revolves around mapping multiple host ports to corresponding container ports, further complicated by our SSL certificate setup.

To streamline the Node.js and Docker deployment process, I’ve been experimenting with bash scripts, aiming to automate these tasks efficiently. For the React Project, I’ve successfully established a Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline, facilitating deployments into the Google AppScript environment through Clasp. All of this is being built leveraging Github Actions. I am also working on refactoring the code base to make it more robust, modular and readable.

While working on the AI vertical of StackIt I am planning to invest time to understand the prompt engineering behind the entire infrastructure of Lookup AI. Our strategic plan involves developing a platform that can effortlessly translate natural language queries into SQL, automating the entire data extraction and analysis process.

I am still looking to write papers on String Theory and LLMs. Haven’t gotten around to it yet.

August

In between all this chaos, Khusi flew from Dubai to come to visit me in Bangalore. An entire weekend of fun and frolic ensued, as we explored the city and enjoyed each other’s company. It was a much-needed break from the stress of the past few weeks. Two days felt like what was a few hours, and I cherished every moment of it. She left on a Sunday night, and I was back to the grind. I felt extremely grateful to have my mother and Khusi by my side. I do not know how I would have managed without them. These are times when I just sit back and wonder how much life has given me and amongst a busy schedule, tough job, less money, and hundreds of whatnots, I have a thousand reasons to be grateful and happy.

Whilst I want to go back to my home, I also love the hustle and bustle of the city and want to build something here. This eternal dilemma is killing me. I am trying to find a balance between the two. Bangalore brings out hope, and discomfort, moulding and shaping me in different forms, challenging me while providing me with growth and success. On the other hand, my home is a place of comfort, love, and familiarity, and provides a sense of belonging.

July

The past few months have been a whirlwind of new experiences for me. Navigating a new city, a fresh job, and an unfamiliar way of life has certainly kept me on my toes. I have been trying to get a hang of the new city, the new job and the new life. I got to attend a lot of networking events in Bangalore. At StackIt, we meet a lot of startups and enterprises and try to see if our product solves their problem. We went to Chargebee’s Finance and Ops conference, Google IO Connect, and The Magic Ball event. Each of these experiences provided valuable insights into the industry landscape and allowed us to make meaningful connections. Moreover, our recent involvement in YC’s Startup School, focusing specifically on the AI domain, proved to be a significant milestone. This platform served as the launch pad for our AI vertical, marking a successful endeavour in this direction.

However, life threw me a curveball when I fell ill just last month. The diagnosis was a combination of dengue and a stomach ulcer, which necessitated a week-long hiatus to recover back home. My return to Bangalore revealed a turbulent living situation. I had to shift from where I was staying since the rent and overall expenses of the place shot up. There were a lot of unknowns and a ton of expenses that kept on piling up. My roommates did not inform me earlier about this and as soon as I paid the deposit, I was confronted with a daunting list of a shitload of bills that I needed to clear. As I refused to pay, they asked me to find a replacement, or else I would not get back the deposit.

Meanwhile, Srijan encountered his housing predicament. His landlord’s strict no-visitor policy left us with no option but to consider securing a place of our own. Amidst these challenges, my mother stepped in admirably, caring for me during my illness and remaining by my side upon my return to Bangalore. She stayed here for a month. Now, as she is gone I am in profound sadness. I feel extremely homesick and all I want to do is live with my family.

June

Moving to Bangalore has been tough. The sheer number of people and the traffic is overwhelming. Coming from a place where I had my room, spent a ton of time with my friends, and had a lot of time to myself, it’s been a bit of a challenge to settle down here. I have been trying to get used to the city, and it’s been almost a month since I moved here, and here’s what it’s like.

While adapting to this new environment, at StackIt things have been going great. The product is in a very early stage, so the sheer amount of effort that goes into building the product is immense. The workload is a lot, and it’s difficult to figure out where time passes by. Looking back, I see that it’s already July, and it feels as if I had just joined a few days back!

I have been actively engaged in client-side development using React and Google App Script while waiting for the setup of the development environment. The backend is written in NodeJs and here’s more on how StackIt operates. Though I have been enjoying working with React, the client-side development env is wrecked, and it takes a lot of time; To render changes I always need to do a test deployment. The code is written by someone before me, and it’s challenging to understand the workflow, I have been trying to get a hang of it since I joined. I have already shipped a few features and bug fixes, and I am looking forward to working on the backend.

I am looking out for side work and got a side gig as a full-stack developer at Asymmetri. I am working on a PDF generator. To accomplish this, I am working with React, Vite, Next.js, and Firebase as the technology stack. While I’m considering Bootstrap for the UI, I haven’t finalized the decision just yet.

May

As I near the end of my four-not-so-long-year college journey, it feels like the end of an era. Looking back, I am filled with immense gratitude for the incredible experiences and memories that I have garnered throughout my college life. I made lifelong friends, discovered new passions, and grew both personally and professionally. Teasquared is an ode to my alma mater.

Reflecting on my journey, I recently bid adieu to the IEEE Students’ Chapter, where I served as the President (Chairperson) for the past year. Aditya passed on the torch and I did my best to keep it lit. I am proud of the accomplishments of the chapter and the team that I worked with, and I hope that the chapter continues to grow and thrive in the years to come. I still remember the day Saurav sir and I established SWITCH, the official coding club of the college. We wanted to establish a coding community for students by conducting workshops, hackathons, and coding competitions. I wish SWITCH all the best with its new management and hope it continues to thrive. I wanted to accomplish a lot with CBRTL but maybe the timing wasn’t right. Srijan and I started cbrtl, a small, tight-knit group of programmers and open-source sorcerers who like to craft fun projects together and build a community. The Social Media Cell was a fun experience. I worked as a photographer, and I was responsible for capturing the moments and memories of the college. We recently had a hearty farewell organized by the whole SSMC team, and hope to stay connected with each other.

While it is bittersweet to say goodbye to this phase of my life, I am eagerly looking forward to embarking on a new chapter. With my sights set on new horizons, I am excited to see where life takes me and to see what the future holds. I am exploring my options and scouring for opportunities. I intend to work with the biggest tech companies, building products and creating differences.

I got an internship at StackIt. I intend to work with web applications and set up CI/CD and data pipelines.

“At StackIt, we wish to take Spreadsheets into a new era. We are building the next-generation spreadsheet automation platform that will empower 1 billion+ business users to use spreadsheets as their business OS. StackIt is a Google Sheets Editor Plugin. Business teams can rely on StackIt to pull data from popular SaaS tools & internal databases like Chargebee, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc regularly on spreadsheets. They can further analyze and build workflows & dashboards on top of it using StackIt.” - StackIt.

April

I hosted a session, Git Groove: Getting into the rhythm of version control with Git & GitHub, with the UnStop Chapter of SIT, BBS and it was a huge success. We are planning to host a more advanced session on Git and GitHub shortly. There’s also a web development workshop coming up.

Meanwhile, at IEEE, we arranged a talk show that focused on getting to know IEEE and its benefits. The IEEE Students Chapter is dedicated to promoting knowledge and understanding of engineering.

I am still looking to write papers on String Theory and LLMs. Haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Lately, I’ve been working on a custom bit-torrent client to download files and movies based on recommendations from my movie recommendation system and a movie rating prediction system. I’m planning to port it to Rust later.

I recently visited Bangalore and met with my friends; to explore and pursue a new idea. We had a great time, and I look forward to meeting them again. My primary priority remains the same, to work with one of the top tech companies and work on projects I am passionate about. While I go and hunt, Srijan and I have planned to start something of our own! The egg has just been laid, and we have a lot of figuring out to do, but I am excited about it.

March

March had mid-semester exams in stock for me. I thought I wouldn’t pull through and fail miserably. (Chill. That didn’t happen xD). But as I geared towards preparing for the exams, desperately trying to collect notes, a sense of responsibility dawned upon me. khusi reminded me that we were supposed to build the half-baked project together that makes notes and academic materials accessible for free and I started on the first day of my exam and completed it Resoc on the last day of the exam. (Funny how I managed to find a way not to study enough xD). You can read more about it here. We acquired a user base of 96 with an average engagement time of 3m14s and more than 2980 reads within a week of launch! We are looking for active contributors interested in contributing their notes.

With the end of the semester approaching, I am looking forward to a much-needed break. However, this impending respite also brings with it the realization that my time in college, particularly with my friends, is dwindling. My mind races back to those initial days when I struggled to introduce myself to seniors and make friends. Those moments, in retrospect, were the extent of my worries back then!

Today, the landscape of my concerns has transformed exponentially. Each morning, as I wake up, a whirlwind of thoughts engulfs my mind. I became aware that there is an overwhelming number of challenges and dilemmas that I may never fully resolve.

Now, standing at the crossroads between the present and the future, I’m confronted with the weight of responsibilities and uncertainties. The path to adulthood feels daunting, and the magnitude of the challenges can be overwhelming.

As the days of college slip away, I’m determined to make the most of the time I have left. I cherish the friendships I’ve formed and know that they may change but will always hold a special place in my heart.

Furthermore, as I gear up to graduate this year, I am actively scouring the web for compelling summer internship opportunities.

February

I am thrilled to have bagged the Best Delegate award in the XIMUN 2023, the annual Model United Nations conference hosted by XIM University, with my go-to co-delegate, Avinash. Our team represented Pakistan in the Disarmament and International Security Committee (DISEC). We decided to go with Pakistan because representing any other nation or a P5/ NATO nation is relatively more straightforward because there are fewer fingers pointed at you and Pakistan presented a unique challenge due to its reputation for alleged notorious activities. Overall, it was a satisfying victory, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have participated.

I am looking to write blogs/papers on ‘String Theory’ soon. I have always been intrigued by the theory and couldn’t get my head to wrap around it. However, now that my college years are ending, I plan to dedicate my time to writing about it. Another topic that I wanted to work on is ‘Natural Language Models’. I intend to delve deeper into exploring how exactly natural language models work, the neural networks behind them, and some of the most popular models based on transformer architecture, like BERT, and GPT-3. You’re always welcome to reach out if you want to collaborate on any of these topics.

I am modifying zuzu to port my blog (written in Hugo) to zuzu. This entire site and the blog are now built using zuzu. Zuzu is a custom static site generator written in JavaScript. It includes static file compilation, dynamic search, and an RSS feed generator. You can find the source code here. Currently, it is in a very early stage of development, and it is designed to work like a basic static site generator. But it can be modified to cater to your needs easily.

January

My time as a full-stack engineer at Squbix Digital had to come to an end. I’m grateful for the opportunity. I was tasked with building web and mobile apps to integrate with the spinal blockchain. I got to work with TypeScript, NodeJs, ReactJs, React Native, Substrate, and Rust and learned a ton. I worked with Web-3; cryptocurrencies, decentralized applications, blockchains, and NFTs. I was responsible for refactoring React-Native applications with better UI, building offline consistent storage services, push notifications, and an internal ERP system to monitor the attendance and tasks of employees. This also involved designing backend APIs using NodeJs and ExpressJs. I modified the existing NodeJs code configuring optional parameters to switch between blockchains. I refactored the JS-based SDK to TypeScript. We also had to build a browser extension, and a PWA for the wallet-to-wallet transactions and used Mocha for unit testing. In the Polkadtot chain, I modified the existing DID pallet using Rust-Lang and Substrate to store identity information in the blockchain with additional unit tests.

I embarked on an exhilarating trip to two of India’s most bustling cities, Mumbai and New Delhi. The highlight of my visit was undoubtedly attending Mood Indigo 2023, the annual cultural extravaganza hosted by IIT Bombay. The experience left me in awe! I was also the Contingent Leader of my college.