Tagged "misc"

It is that time of the year again. Or, to be precise, it is 51 days after that time of last year. I’ve been remiss in my schedule for these posts. But it is the time when I reflect upon my growth in tech over the past year. Like last years post, this one goes over what I learned, some of the opinions I formed, what I could have done better, and what I think I should focus on in 2022.

While I do this primarily to track my progress, I do hope that those who read about my growth find it instructive, and walk away having gained something from it. With that happy thought, let’s get started.

What programming language should you learn first? Back in University, juniors who wanted to get on the programming roller coaster often asked me this. After much deliberation, I think I have my answer. In this post I express why I think a lot of conventional wisdom here isn’t the best, and what I suggest as the first language for getting started with coding.

Whether you’re starting out in a new job or team, or if you’re trying to contribute to a Open Source project that you’re new to, having to familiarise yourself with an alien codebase is something a software dev will have to do at some point in their lives. You won’t start all projects from scratch. This isn’t easy by any measure (at least not for me), but I try to share some of the tricks that I’ve picked up to get up to speed with a new codebase in this post.

2020 has easily been the most profound year for me as a tech enthusiast. I graduated with a CS degree, got an amazing job, picked up 2 new languages (Go and Clojure), revisited 2 other langauges that I thought I knew but clearly didn’t (C and Rust), and explored many new domains (most notably cybersecurity and cloud engineering). This post is a loosely organized collection of my thoughts and experiences related to each of these items, as well as some insight into how I achieved some of the things I achieved this year.

So if you’re going to be kind enough to indulge me, let’s start talking!