Jan 2024 - journal

02 February, 2024

It feels like this month passed by quite quickly. Feel like I didn’t accomplish that much. But still it’s a good month. I discovered certain aspects of my life, asked a lot of questions to myself and some problems within me.

Problem solving streak

I was solving data structure and algorithms problems for a while given by Daily byte as well as some leetcode ones. And I wanted to maintain that streak. But eventually it went off with a little bit of laziness along with the problems getting tougher.

Here are my repos, Daily byte (24 problems) - https://github.com/djhemath/The-Daily-Byte-problems
Other problems (8 problems) - https://github.com/djhemath/Coding-Challenges

Took an unintentional break with these data structures and algorithms. But I have to return to it to make things easy for me when I switch jobs eventually.

The side project (Dev profile page)

I’ve been working on this hobby side project. It was a very old idea that was living in my Figma. Recently I committed to building things with my current knowledge. It’ll help me showcase my work to the world and will increase my credibility.

Oh man, finding motivation is not easy with hobby projects. Some days I sit and overdo it, and other days I just stare at the screen and do nothing completely. But I wanna push myself and complete this project as soon as possible.

After some days, I found out that we can add something called “Topics” to our repos in Github. It acts like tags. I added that for the frontend repo and the next day I received a comment on one of my issues. A person asked if they could work on that issue. I obviously said yes, but that person didn’t respond.

Checkout the project - https://github.com/Dev-Profile-Page

The Birthday

It was a dramatic day. One of my good friends, also a sister “Rij” brought me a cake for my birthday. But she forgot the actual date and ended up visiting me a day before my birthday. It’s kind of a new experience to cut my birthday cake before a day. Her face when she realized that Jan 20 isn’t my birthday was funny.

She brought a birthday hat, it’s my first time having one. Me, wearing a birthday cap

A funny thing happened, as I’m not used to celebrating my birthdays, especially with cakes, I forgot to blow out the candles before cutting it. Me, mom and Rij didn’t realize that candles are not off. 😄

The surprise

As the day went off, I felt sleepy early and went to bed. Exactly at 12 I got a call from Rij wishing for my birthday again 🤦. Lost my sleep.

Around 12.20, I got a birthday wish as a message from my so-called bestie “Harini”.

Another 10 mins passed and I got a call from “Sai” - a well wisher, mentor, brother. He wished me, and that was a complete surprise. His wife “Ramya” wished me (yes, he got finally married last year). And Ragav (a well wisher, mentor, brother, my network interface card 😄, etc.,) was also in the call. At first, he acted like he didn’t know about my birthday and I thought that he forgot that.

All of a sudden, Sai asked me to open the door, I was shocked.

Following things are going in my mind,
“Did Sai really come to my home?”
“He doesn't know the location, how can he come?”
“He is also a space enthusiast, so maybe he spotted a cool start or structure in the sky and he will ask me to look that”
“Are there going to be any jumpscares?”

While on the call, I opened the door, nobody’s there. Went to take a look at the main door and I saw “Ramya” standing alone with a box.

I’m stunned, they really came to my home. But I don’t see Ragav or Sai anywhere. In the call, Sai told that he was not there, only Ramya came. Though it’s hard to believe, I brought her up and closed the main door. Suddenly after some seconds, both Sai and Ragav showed up at the door.

They are playing with me, but me being stupid didn’t guess that. Brought everyone up to the home. Sang the birthday song while I cut the cake (blowed the candle this time though 😄). Shared the cake, and…

The socially inactive Hemath don’t even know what to speak despite Sai asking me to speak something. I kept quiet, didn’t know what to talk about, it was some awkward moment. I've never been like that, but I really felt that I’m socially bad these days. I should get my ass off my chair, go out, and interact with real people more often.

After these, my childhood friend ‘Pavan’ called me to wish. We spoke for a while, cracked some jokes. And I wasn’t able to sleep, so we both ended up playing a game (PUBG) together till 6AM in the morning.

Karthi - hospitalized - but back

Karthi - one of my college friends is hospitalized for about a month because of an issue with the nervous system. Some kinda fever disturbed his nervous system and he wasn’t able to lift his hands and not even walk normally.

After doing a plasma replacement, he is now feeling somewhat better. Discharged from the hospital. He can walk, but slowly, hands are okay, but still need more improvement. Doctors asked him to continue physio exercises. We don’t know how long it’ll take for him to be back to normal. Hoping that he will get better soon.

He is out of hospital, that's very good news for the month. 🥳

Driving class

Completed all of my driving classes. I got some confidence. Still didn’t apply for LLR. Instructor is delaying things. I don’t know the reason, it’s making me furious. Already paid for the LLR at the beginning of the course, but not yet applied for the LLR.

I may wait for this week. If there are no good updates, I should take action. Probably ask him to return the money.

Some achievements

Learned to use the react-hook-form and integrated it with my custom components in the Dev profile page project. Faced issues with file uploads, but solved it eventually.
Completed an algorithm that randomly picks a position in an image, draws a custom shape in it and extracts a copy of that shape. It’s used in the “Slider captcha” variant in my office project “MTCaptcha”. I did all this with plain ol’Java and AWT. The performance is stunning, it takes just 7ms to generate a pair of images.
Strongly said NO to my other project in the office as I used up my allocated time for that project. I defended all the requests, urgent things and boldly said No.

Some failures/mistakes

Broke the streak of problem solving.
Accidentally committed credentials in .env.sample file in Dev profile page project. Sample file is supposed to have empty variables, but I copy pasted the original env file and committed it.

Important moments

Engaged in a conversation with my ex and only girlfriend 😄. I blocked her on all the platforms except Linkedin. And just couldn’t resist the urge to speak with her. I can’t categorize it into positive or negative. It’s something different. But ended up heartbroken and non-productive for a couple of days.
Birthday made me realize that I’m socially inactive.
Met a Canadian lady on the beach, her name is Angela. When I was returning home from the beach, she stopped and asked me to sit with her. We just talked about general life for a while. She is also an introvert like me, and feels like she is also facing issues in her life. She came to India for some sort of medical support. Had a chit-chat and moved on.
Karthi is back from hospital and he is doing better.

Realizations

I’m not socially active. Previously I’m an introvert, and didn't have any confidence to talk to new people. But now my confidence has increased, but I’m not yet socialized. I’ve been on my computer and mobile phone all the time and I seriously lack social interaction. I couldn’t even interact with my close people as I used to in the past.
Leaving too much of a gap in a relationship will never improve it. It’ll basically decompose the relationship.
I feel like I have grown in the art of building softwares. The hobby project that I’m working on has a form and a handful of small features. But I spend more time researching, studying, thinking about edge cases instead of coding it out. Previously, in my early days, I used to code out anything immediately. Just realized that I'm improving at it.

Things I learned

Learned to use GeneralPath in AWT to draw out custom shapes.
Learned a bit about the Bezier curve.
Learned react-hook-form and prisma.
Refreshed my knowledge on React.useEffect. And came to know that there is an experimental useEffectEvent out there.

Goals / plans / decisions

Join the Think Digital community and teach students some tech stuff. And interact more with people.
Planned to go out to a mall or something with a couple of college friends - Athiyamaan and Karthik Ram.
Planned to go to Pondicherry by Feb 17 with my other college friend Maries to experience Mangrove forest boating in Pichavaram.
Improve the Readme of Dev profile page project, add topics, add more issues and make things easy for the people to collaborate.
Start teaching DSA for Ragav.
Continue DSA - start from Trees and Graphs.
Decided not to engage in any freelance work until I switch my job and get comfortable.
Should stop consuming more content. Spending too much time on reading blogs, newsletter, watching a lot of Youtube videos and Netflix. I should reduce the consumption and start producing things.

Movies / series

The wall - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4218696
13 hours - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4172430
Breaking bad (season 1) - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903747
Kaithi - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9900782