Year in Review & Leaving a Statement — Dec 27, 2021
Activities, Takeaways, and Statements for the Year 2021
Placements:
- Get your hands dirty with LeetCode if placements are a year away. I studied DS & Algos by solving 750+ problems on LeetCode and 1000+ problems across all platforms in a stretch of 400+ days.
- I was able to crack OAs of Microsoft, Cisco, Twitter, Amazon, MotorQ, Zoho, etc.
- P.S. I might be the right person to ask about preparation for product-based companies, so check out my blog on Programming Interviews.
- Statement: Intent > Tier 2. I Can > IQ. When you march on, the universe conspires & reshapes itself to make it happen.
Building:
- We won our 12th hackathon at IIT Madras before graduating, after which our spidey sense told us that hackathons had a poor effort vs ROI quotient. Our building interests changed.
- Takeaways: The computation platform keeps changing every decade. Ben Horowitz predicted the rise of crypto, Web3, DAOs, and DeFis. Flow towards what's important.
- Statement: On the internet, if you're not growing, you're dying. Since the internet is always growing rapidly, stagnant growth means you're actually declining. If you're in the 2020s and you're not building, you're missing out.
Handling Burnouts:
- Eat clean, sleep early and tight. If you're a proactive person, discover your small pleasures, things you feel are creative, like a child. I termed them reactive breaks.
- Watch what Adam Grant says about burnout.
- Statement: Be, that's enough. Do it because you're privileged. You do it because you can. What flows, flows. What crashes, crashes.
Distributed Systems:
- Got into distributed systems, Cloud, AWS, GCE, and building projects.
- Built a single binary agent to log OS performance metrics and stream those log files for forecasting and predicting downtime, similar to ManageEngine by Zoho.
- Statement: Distributed systems are cool. Look out for them in the 2020s.
Building — Phase 2:
- Reminds me of the line towards the end of Alice in Wonderland. The Red Queen, I believe, makes such a comment about how fast you have to run to stay in the same place versus get anywhere.
- Build in your 20s.
- Statement: Be vulnerable; you're going to die anyway. Caring about judgments rationally won't make sense. Genuine curiosity is a superpower!