Last time I did a status update I had completed my training at work and had joined a product team. I can't really remember what my expectations where when I joined, to be honest I think I was anxious as to how I'd perform. Long story short I continue to learn a lot and it's fun. Right now I'm learning more and more about things like fixing bugs in a live applications in graceful way, handling exceptions in production, the importance of and how to do proper logging, SQL (no, seriously.), optimizing code for resource intense tasks etc. It's all very interesting stuff.

Almost everyday at work feels eventful, even though it's the same me sitting on same desk every day typing on the same keyboard. Something I've been struggling though however is with work life balance. It was definitely worse in the beginning. Like I spent hours on weekdays working and walked into the weekend feeling really tired, as in I am definitely not going to code for the next two days. This was weird for me because I never felt that before. Something else I noticed was that my contribution to FOSS dropped down to nothing. This was mostly because I was not able to commit to anything that would take more than a day or two's worth of work and even then when the weekends rolled out I just felt like lying on my bed in silence for a while. This is when my workplace does not have any sort of toxic hustle culture in fact it promotes working for not more than 40 hours a week and taking the weekend off unless you, the developer decides that it was absolutely necessary for you to work during the weekend. I was the issue here. I am working on getting this right. And yes my close friends have pointed out to the lack of a hobby in my life. More on that later.

I was hoping to go to Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) ¹ this year in the hopes that it will help me start reading fiction again. From the ages of 13 to 17 I used to read anything I could get my hands on. But during college I started to focus more on computer science and the stuff I read gradually lost it's diversity and some time during my third year I sort of realized that I struggled to turn pages on actually good fiction books. Anything technical, I can get through that shit like that insert sound of fingers snapping. When it came to fiction it just didn't happen. I don't want to think that I am over fiction as a genre because that to me is just sad. So I decieded to do what I can to get my mojo back so as to speak. I found a few people who were also inteding to go and we made plans as well but fate had other plans. Quite anti-climatically, KLF was canceled this year due to rising COVID cases in Kerala. At this point I was seriously craving a break and I guess the others were as well because those of us who were planning to go to KLF decieded that we'd go to IFFK ² instead. So Me, some friends of mine and a few strangers (to me) went to IFFK. We were a pretty fun group to be honest. We had people like me who enjoys the artform that is film and then we had people who were actually aspiring film makers, ready to pour out their blood sweat and tears into it and … we really clicked as a group.

Running around Thiruvananthapuram, deciding what films to watch, the discussions after watching each film, deciding a place to eat that everyone likes, late night meals and the conversations.

While I didn't think much of those moments then now they have turned into really fond memories. More than the actual film festival it was the experience of watching movies with these folks that made the experience worth it for me. So if you people are reading this, thanks for some special days in my life.

The truth of the matter is that I think a lot and that combined with the sheer number of choices of hobbies one could pick resulted in me not picking one. A few things I seriously considered are wood working, cycling, mechanical keyboards (impractical as a hobbby? Yes. Very satifying? Also yes.), learning how to play a musical instrument and yes reading. To be brutally honest I spent the last 4 months procrastinating over what hobby to pick. The only two hobbies I really had during the past few years were programming and tinkering with my setup. Tinkering with my GNU/Linux setup really works for me. Like installing a new distribution and trying it out is actually something I find very cathartic, not a joke. But a few weeks ago my laptop got an issue with it's display and the people at the service center are figuring out whether the issue is with a specific chip on the motherboard or the dedicated graphics card it comes with. This meant that I no longer had GNU/Linux as an option. This is where I would say I started to seriously think about another hobby. Recently (as in, a few months ago) I started getting into self hosting stuff, which is yet another slippery slope. I almost fell down the rabbit hole but instead I am sticking to just self hosting nextcloud for now. Primarily because I don't really needs a whole bunch of stuff and I don't want to simply create a VPS running something I wouldn't use slowly burning carbon into the atmosphere. So that's that. Anyways the search continues. Feel free to suggest me anyhting you think I should try. As always mail works best.

This is a thought that I came across inadvertently and this might come of as pretty weird but apart from work, I don't do a lot of things that require a constant internet connection. I'm the kind of person who likes the idea of having things that I need on me at all times if that makes sense. Up until a year ago every single song/movie I liked I had it locally on my device. It is borderline hoarding and I say borderline because I do clean stuff up and remove the ones I'm over pretty regularly. But then my friends got me hooked on streaming stuff. So now if I didn't do instant messaging which I don't do much of anyway and stream stuff from spotify, youtube and netflix, I could live with having access to the internet for an hour a day. When I thought about this, the more I realized not long there was a time when I didn't have internet and I lived, pretty happily as well if I say so myself. I am curious about what such a life will be like today. Can I go a day every week without the internet? Is there any actual advantage to this? I don't know. Maybe one of these days I might just give it a shot.

That's about it for this month. Until next time. o/