2024 - a year in review

Travel

• Shimla, Himachal Pradesh
• Tokyo, Japen
• Goa, India
• Lepakshi, India

Life

• learnt to deal with death
• Standing on my own two feet
• was alone in a foreign country for the first time
• pulled myself out of burnout and stagnation
• Attended many concerts - saw some really cool folks live and even a street performance
  • saw Shaan, Shankar Mahadevan, Thaikkudam Bridge, Girish and the Chronicles, Antimatter, Divyatom Deb - live!
• Saw a play live at Ranga Shankara
• played in the snow for the first time ever
• saw the stars at nighttime from a flight, over the sea
• celebrated the first rain of the year :D
• fine-dined for the first time (Zen, Leela Palace)
• Learnt to stop being overly humble and dismissive of myself
• Learnt that many people on the internet just need a reason to hate on someone
• bought my first art and got it framed
• started guitar classes
• officially graduated college
• attended my school's 5 year reunion
• Bought myself
  • Macbook Pro
  • Bose QC Ultra
  • HHKB Professional Hybrid
  • new Guitar Amp
  • CMF Buds pro 2

Health

• Started and finished some degree of personal training in the gym
• taking a morning walk every day is now a habit
• not meditating anymore?
• much more comfortable being alone
• back to playing badminton on a more regular basis

Learning

• Made good progress on reading research papers and books
  • Database Internals: Chapter 5
  • Delta Lake paper
  • Skiplist paper
  • Raft Paper
  • LSM Tree paper
  • Calvin
  • Dostoevsky
• Got back into the habit of writing code on a much more regular basis - pulled myself out of an 8 month long rut
  • Implemented Raft in Rust
  • Implemented an LSM Tree in Rust
  • Implemented a Skiplist in C++
  • Implemented a Vector Clock in Go
  • Implemented an HTTP Timer Daemon in Go
• Implemented multiple prototype/PoC projects
• Started Bengaluru Systems
• bought (and wasted) Codecrafters subscription
• attended and moderated a panel at Rootconf Mini
• Figured out that Sketching is the way to build side projects that works for me

Work

• College send-off - got recognized for my contributions to the department with a separate award and certificate
• Got my paper published and attended an academic conference for the first time ever
• started working full-time
• Started a research paper reading group at work
• joined the AI Team, came up with early prototypes + ideas for hosted RAG pipeline
• joined the Analytics DB Team, did some research on Delta Lake
• joined Magma, started writing C++
• Organzied the Rust Bangalore Meetup at Couchbase