Welcome Back

Hello, dear interweb friends. It's been a while, hasn't it? It has. I had to disappear for a while to finish the first year of my engineering education, which has been an excellent learning experience that I'd like to repeat only for the amount of learning I had while making CS projects on my own (and nothing else).

The past six to eight months have been, if nothing, proof that pressure can bring out the best and worst in us. There's so much I've learnt about myself during this period that I now realize will help me be a better person and a more functional adult. I wish it'd happen under better circumstances, but it's also clear that the only way to keep going is to remember to make the very best of what we have in the limited time we've got.

College

While the fact that we had to start our college life in the grand halls of MS Teams and Whatsapp (as opposed to those of our campus) was definitely disappointing, I don't ever think I've come across a group of people who forged friendships as fast as my fellow batchmates did. Step on to campus and you'll forget that the first half of our first year was online!

There's definitely something to be said with regard to how social dynamics evolve in an online setup as opposed to that of an offline setup. The benefit of this is everyone knows everyone to a large extent, and it happened a lot faster than it would've happened offline. The relatively unseen consequence of this is directly reflected in the group-oriented nature of real-life interactions - you'll often find people hanging out with those in the same whatsapp group or discord server, leaving out those who aren't in either. I'm definitely looking to change this about my interaction with people here on out - if you see me, come say hi!

Computer Science

At this point I'm more or less convinced of my areas of interest. The introductory CS101 and CS151 courses at my university enjoyed a set of relatively high-quality assignments (which I thoroughly enjoyed). To allay my boredom, I Implemented An End to End Encryption Demonstration and A Learning Clone of MySQL, both of which were excellent amounts of fun to work on.

I'm currently working on implementing the Minimax Algorithm for a player-vs-computer Tic-Tac-Toe which you can find here. Optimizing this involved me restructuring the entire game state to ensure a single game of TicTacToe can safely be stored in a single unsigned 32-bit integer, and I learned loads about bitmasks, too! Bitwise logic implementations are worth the effort you put into them 😉.

I'll be diving a lot deeper into the systems programming side of things. Database technology and Container Orchestration also interest me a lot, and I'll be looking for excellent ways to learn the ins and outs of these tools.

I've also been chosen as a Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador, and that's really exciting! I look forward to empowering the community around me, and helping people make the best of their talents and gifts.

Research and Learning

Distributed Systems, Databases and Kubernetes are the three things that I'll definitely be learning a lot more about in the upcoming semester!

The Blog

Ah, yes! The blog. Here's a list of all the things that changed:

1. Fixed UI and Styling (made it a lot more pleasant on the eyes)
2. Fixed table styling
3. Updated post info, added image support (back?)
4. Added filenames for code blocks, like this
5. Fixed a bunch of npm install issues

print("hello, world!")

console.log("Why is this not a hello world message?")

fn main() {
    println!("hello");
}

What Next?

Excellent question! For starters, I plan to be blogging a lot more to ensure I'm keeping the knowledge feedback loop alive. There's going the be the usual nerd-sniping from the most interesting things at the worst possible times, but hey, it'll be in the same domain this time around!

I'm looking at modifying my sleep schedule to let me get in an hour or so of reading every morning - I think it'll help make me a lot more prepared than most. I've also bought a bunch of books that should keep me company.

If you've got any ideas, feel free to drop a message!