For the Love of Learning!

Today is 15th January 2023 and I have been dying to do this for a long time now! I have been a software engineer for a while now(around 3 years). I love this profession because it has helped me to reach my goals of uplifting my family and providing for them. Also as a software engineer or a computer science engineer, I feel like I have the power to build anything I put my mind to. But the problem is, I have not done quite a lot of that: building anything I want or I know the people around me could benefit from. If I look back, I have come a long way and I have learned a lot of things and I am much more proficient in programming than when I started. But I am not where I think I should be according to my own standards. It is not just imposter syndrome, I actually know I am not at the level I would like to see myself. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that I am an incompetent engineer. I have been working professionally as a full-stack developer and I can work my way through complex web apps and build a few from scratch. It's just that I am the kind of person who really wants to excel in his or her craft. And I still feel like I have a lot to learn. I have not practiced enough and I have not built enough outside of my day job. I want to explore more outside of my day job as a software engineer. I want to be more than just an end-user waiting for some functionality to be built into one of my favorite software or open-source software. I want to be able to solve more problems and give back to the generous and beautiful Software developer community that we have. And in all this, one of my aims remains to be a technology-agnostic developer or polyglot developer by working across different technologies and products, which I have not been able to realize yet.

I have this whole big pile of ideas that I never even started, a lot of unfinished projects in my GitHub, and lots of things (like competitive programming, participating in hackathons, and sharing my knowledge through blogs and other means) that I never did. And it surely has kept me from being the developer that I always wanted to be. There is a no. of reasons for that. But again mentioning reasons would be an excuse and I don't want to give any excuse this time. So, I am starting this blog to start something I should have started way before.

This blog is my way of starting to learn in public. By learning in public, I mean 2 things: Actually committing to learning and sharing something which I don't know about, and, sharing something I know might be helpful to others. There is a thin line between the two. Former is more about being a total noob in something and actually sharing my progress on how I am learning it and building things with it(e.g. How I learned rust in 30 days). Later is more about something I know already and sharing a new way to do with it something that I discovered(e.g. Did you know python has a standard library specifically for toml?).

I am pretty decent in Python and javaScript(the technology I have worked with professionally over the past few years) but there are many many new things that I want to learn(I am a learning junkie!). I think I am like most developers in the sense that I have so many things I want to do with programming and many new things that I want to explore but I am very lazy. Usually caught up in my day job as a software developer, I have been procrastinating on learning new tech stacks and building cool things with them. it is long overdue! Also like most developers, I have a large list of books, courses, and programs that I have collected or enrolled in over time, but never finished any of those(Some of them have cost a significant amount of money). With this new year, I want to change everything. So, I am kind of committing to the following through this blog series:

1. I won't be buying new courses and try to finish all the courses that are relevant to my goals currently(This year is more about finishing what I already have than buying new stuff)

2. I have enrolled myself in the Scaler Academy program one year ago. Like all of the other undertakings, I have not been much sincere here as well. I have a huge backlog in this program. I will clear all my backlogs and complete the program. I will write a separate article on this one.

3. I will be building more stuff this year with the new technologies that I am learning. This year is not just about consuming courses but more about applying what I have learned and building cool things.

And along with all the above, most importantly, I am committing to sharing the knowledge with the public that I gain in the process. It's about showing myself that if we become more action-oriented, we can do wonders. I hope this will motivate anyone reading this to start their own journey and learn and share new things that they have come across. I don't know if anyone is reading this. First and foremost, I am doing it for myself. But through this blog, I also want to share the little knowledge I have acquired over the years as a professional full-stack developer and the new exciting things that I will be learning and building this year.

If you want to follow along with me on my journey, make sure to follow me here and on Twitter(My DM's are open as well). There I will be sharing even more stuff related to software engineering and the concise format of this blog. Any comments or similar stories are welcome! Let this be the year where upon seeing any new codebase or technology, instead of saying, "Wow, that looks tough!", we say "Lol! That was way easier than I imagined"

I will soon come up with my next article! Till then Happy Learning and Happy Coding!

Cover Image: The image is taken from a popular MIT course by Professor Walter Lewin, For the Love of Physics which has inspired the title of this blog series and post.