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I’ve been using the Notion App for a few months now, and I love it. It’s extremely powerful, flexible, and lets you do more than you can imagine. It’s like a combined and a better version of Google Keep and Evernote combined. However, there is a known problem with the mobile app which hasn’t been addressed for the longest. And it is that of the launch time. It works beautifully on the desktop but takes forever to launch on the mobile. From my past experiences, I’ve seen apps behave this way when there is a lot of initial asset loading and syncing happening in the background, specifically at the splash screen stage. While I assumed that we as tech community stopped doing lazy loading this way a few years ago, this app has reminded us that we haven’t.

I had been wanting to learn more about serverless architectures for some time and after a going through it in detail, I think it’s very promising. The hype is totally justified! It changes the game in many ways, and is a good way of inclusion. It simplifies the entry barrier for people who are just starting and saves them the time and complexity of the traditional REST APIs.

I discovered something very simple, but fascinating today! Since this website is made using Github pages, what Github essentially does is every time I make any changes to the code on the local machine, and commit and push to the master repo on Git, it verifies and rebuilds as per the new commit. If there is an error in the code, the build fails at the verification stage.

• To update the subsystem:

After all these years, and a month after starting writing code again, I got a feeling that I was in the zone today. It sounds like a weird term, but no, I was. I started my day by working on something related to a Django tutorial. Then I moved to resolve the SSL issue on this webpage, which I could after some help from a dear friend. I then moved to set up Ubuntu subsystem on Windows and using that instead of Windows Cmd for command-line work. I again had to install ruby, gems, GCC, Make, Jekyll, and set up Git on the new subsystem. Even got to resolve my first git merge conflict after so long. Who could have thought that I would enjoy doing this!

While I’m a computer science engineer by qualification, and have worked as an iOS and Python developer for about 4 yrs, it has been six years that I’ve written a line of any meaningful code. I’ve been a Product Manager and a Tech Consultant for last 6 yrs and have enjoyed doing it. In November 2019, I decided to move to Melbourne, Austalia from Delhi/Kasauli, India, and life has been a bit of a roller-coaster ever since. In last 6 months, I have seen terrible bushfires, a holiday season, and the corona virus lockdown. All my personal and professional plans have gone for a toss with no relief in sight. To make things worse, I also lost my last remote job in the process and have been struggling to find a meaningful one ever since. In simple words, life hasn’t been the best in last 6 months. And I’m sure I’m not the only one!

Being away from my family, friends and loved ones, the mind has also done what it does best: make me more anxious about my own life with every passing day. It’s like a race against time with no real end goal. It’s like I’m racing to achieve something, but I don’t know what. There are days when I feel that I’m chasing excellence, and then there are days when I feel that none of this makes any sense. It’s difficult to distinguish the good from the bad, right from wrong. There are days when I don’t know what I want, and there are days when I don’t know why I am doing what I am doing. It’s not the first time in my life that I’ve felt this way. I have dealt with these situation in the past, and will deal with it this time too. I can even talk and write about it freely, but that probably comes with the age.

The reason I wrote some code and this blog exists is because I decided to get back to writing code again. This extraordinary situation of lockdown has taught me a few things. It has given me a lot of down-time to think about what I want, and the direction in which our world as we see it, is moving. And I’ve summarised it to three main points:

1. Irrespective of what you are doing, the work that you do should be more of a hard-skill than a soft-skill. We’re moving towards a world where the professions will be streamlined, and anyone dispensable will meet his/her fate.

2. No matter what we do, our work should have the scope of being location agnostic. I’m a big advocate of remote work, and can see the ecosystem shifting in that direction.

3. Having lived both the lives, that of a developer and that of a manager, I need to learn to strike a balance between the two. I left one for the other, and re-learning that skill will be a challenge now. But a challenge I’m willing to invest in.

I got back to practicing writing code last month and haven’t looked back since. I’ve invested my time, money and energy into this with some achievable goals in sight. I have a good feeling about this! While I do get my share of doubts from time to time, yet I’m mostly confident about what I’m doing. The believe in keeping your head down and keep working towards it, and build things, one thing at a time.

It’s not easy, I can promise you that. And if you’re not confident about it, you shouldn’t do it. It took me a career of 9 yrs to figure out what all I want and what I don’t. I hope you are smarter than me. I’m also aware of the fact that almost every game is a young man’s game. And while I’m not relatively young. I’m okay with it! I hope you find something where you feel the same way. I hope you come back for future posts. Either ways, I hope you have a good journey.