Year in Review & Leaving a Statement

Activities, Takeaways, & Statements for the year 2021

Placements:

• Get your hands dirty with LeetCoding if placements are a year away. I grinded DS & Algos, 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, with which our spidey sense told us that Hackathons had 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, if you’re not building, you’re missing out.

Handling burnouts:

• Eat clean, sleep early n’ 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.
• Build 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 is cool. Look out for it 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 at the same place versus get anywhere.
• Build in your 20s.
• Statement: Be vulnerable, you’re anyway gonna die, caring about judgments rationally won’t make sense. Genuine curiosity is a superpower!

That’s about it for 2021.