My Journey

I don’t really have a clean origin story. I just always liked messing with computers more than actually using them.

the early days

My first real memory with a computer is playing IGI on my landlord’s son’s PC. I was an incredibly curious kid, constantly asking him way too many questions. I didn’t even care about finishing the missions. I was way more curious about what a ‘mod’ was and how people actually built them after I stumbled across a post about it on Quora.

Pretty much everything I know now came from breaking things. My phone was getting way too slow, which made sense considering I was using my mom’s old phone. I opened YouTube to see if I could fix it and stumbled across something called Custom ROMs. That led me to a Telegram channel where I learned about rooting. I was super curious and asked a lot of questions, which is how I ended up meeting a really talented guy named CyberKnight (I wish I had his socials, but it’s been a while) and the old maintainer of PixelOS. They actually helped me learn how to build custom ROMs, add security patches, and maintain them. Before long, I was maintaining LineageOS builds myself.

Then the exact same thing started happening with my computer. I had bought a second-hand laptop from a shop for 5,000 rupees. I still think I got a pretty good deal considering the price-to-performance ratio at the time, but eventually, Windows started dying on it. I looked up how to make it faster. Back then, I thought macOS and Windows were the only two operating systems in the world; Linux hadn’t even crossed my mind.

I found a video on debloating Windows. It helped a bit, but it was still sluggish. I looked into ChromeOS (which didn’t support my laptop) and Android OS, but I didn’t want a mobile OS on my computer. Eventually, I stumbled on a YouTube channel called Jagatgyan, which walked me through installing Zorin OS. I absolutely loved it. I even considered buying the Pro version, but realized the Core version was perfectly fine. It was way faster than Windows 10, but I still wanted something even snappier.

That started a massive distro-hopping phase. I installed Ubuntu and absolutely hated everything about it. I tried Manjaro (big mistake), Nobara (again, big mistake), and Fedora (I really liked GNOME’s minimalism, but the extensions were always breaking and I didn’t know you could just install a different desktop environment). After that, I installed EndeavourOS, which was pretty minimal and way easier to install than Arch—back then, the Arch install script didn’t really exist, or at least wasn’t nearly as good as it is now. Eventually I ended up installing Lubuntu, which comes with LXQt. That was the snappiest setup yet, and I stuck with it for a very long time on that old machine.

Eventually, I got a new laptop and discovered Window Managers. I started by using installation scripts from HyDE and JaKooLit. Once I got the hang of how Window Managers actually worked, I switched to Arch + i3. I spent the largest chunk of my time there, easily 6+ years. When Wayland got hyped and fixed a bunch of known issues, I switched to Hyprland. But it had breaking changes way too often, so I moved to Sway (which is basically i3 for Wayland). I also installed Niri specifically for gaming because it handles window resizing and app switching so effortlessly. So now I use Sway for coding and Niri for gaming, and I still use that exact setup today.

There were some random side quests too. In 9th grade, I figured out how to install a hotspot on a JioPhone, which let you use the JioPhone’s data plan on a regular smartphone. Since the JioPhone plan was around 40% cheaper than a normal smartphone plan, I started charging classmates 100 rupees to set it up for them. The marketing was entirely word of mouth!

Around that time I also got completely obsessed with chess. I joined a chess club, started teaching chess at my school, and won a few intra-school competitions. The sad part is I always got second or third, but never first.

I also found a new obsession: IEMs. I’ve always loved listening to music, especially soundtracks. Some of my absolute favorites are Succession, The Queen’s Gambit, La La Land, The Godfather, Attack on Titan, Your Lie in April, and Forgotten Odes. But that was just the starting point. From there, I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of buying TWS and headphones. Man, this audio obsession is just never-ending.

where i am now

These days, I’m taking on freelance projects and spending most of my time on backend stuff and writing Go. The only major change to my setup is that about 3 months ago, I finally shifted to Nix. It was honestly the most difficult distro to figure out at the start, but it was the best decision I’ve made, not just as a distro, but for my development workflow. I don’t even have to think about what I’m running anymore, and I never have to worry about version conflicts between different projects. I think that’s the real power of Nix. You just completely forget about the setup itself.

I’ve also started reading a lot more technical blogs, and I can’t stress enough how much you miss out on if you don’t read.

Basically, I just have a vested interest in making my own life hard ha ha.

I started learning Flutter a year back. It was fun at the start, but then I realized I don’t really like creating UI. I think I have good taste, but it gets boring quickly. Especially with AI, it’s so much easier to make UI now, so I shifted to the backend instead. The image above with the vertical screen is my old setup, not my current one.

friend’s birthday

This is an interesting story. In college, this was the only birthday party we celebrated together. He spent way too much money on it. We all thought everyone else would have to match that when their birthdays came around. But when someone’s birthday was near, they would either go visit their relatives or make up some excuse to avoid it. I felt bad for my friend, but honestly, I didn’t want to spend that much money either lol.

boxing

I started learning boxing from YouTube in my second year. Not gonna lie, I was getting pretty good. My cardiovascular health improved a lot, and it gave me way more confidence than just lifting at the gym.

pookie era

You see the two people I’m sitting in the middle of? They are obsessed with taking pictures. And trust me, this is the least embarrassing picture of mine ha ha 😂

friend’s house

This was the first time I actually went to a friend’s home with an invitation lol. We enjoyed it a lot, it was a very memorable day.

farewell

A farewell to the worst, yet good, college life.