It’s been a hot minute since I visited my blog, let alone wrote something. And well we’ve got life to blame for that.
College coursework ramped up to the absolute maximum this semester, and I got caught up with the work on the backend of my education project so much that it completely took away a lot of the joy I had with development for a while. Turns out, Heroku does not process Indian credit cards at all, and I found out when I got an email from Heroku for the termination of our account scheduled in a few weeks.
So yes, not only did I have to learn AWS as quickly as I could, but the additional factor of messing up an entire production server that handles payments made by numerous customers every few days was NOT very conducive to the learning environment. Setting up EC2 instances with the wrong OS, messing up SSH credentials, trying to figure out how the hell to setup pm2 to keep our server always running, and a bucketload full of problems with the architecture of everything as well. It took me about 2 days (and thanks to my bloody exams, they were the 2 days I was supposed to be relaxing on vacation) to get everything migrated and ready to shift to AWS.
I must hand it to AWS though. I was missing out on SO MUCH. EC2 makes life so much easier with logging and server updates, and S3 is a godsend for our application. In my earlier design, I had to put the files in the server’s local file structure first, push that to Github, and then push that to Heroku. Now, I just have to drag and drop the file into the S3 bucket, and that’s all it takes. I am both impressed by how much I optimized that part of the process, and also ashamed of how long it took me to solve this.
However, as fun as coding is, I’ve been struggling a lot the past few months personally. Anxiety, bouts of depression, withdrawing from relationships, you name it I was probably dealing with it. I think I have spent such a major part of the last 4-5 years on my career and work both emotionally and physically, that I’m able to now see how bad a toll it took on me in all other senses. I lost touch with myself and who I was, stopped doing things I enjoyed and only went hyperfocus into programming. It’s fun, but as someone who was so used to living life in a wide domain of activities and ideas, this was very restricting. I am so thankful I had my girlfriend through the entire thing because I would have absolutely lost it way earlier if it wasn’t for her.
Until we broke up a week ago. It hurt like hell trying to get over the loss of not just your long term partner but also your entire support system (that I am still processing), but that is life. I’ve been working on getting back in touch with my friends, going harder in the gym, rediscovering everything I was in love with that I had lost the last 4-5 years working on my career. I picked up my sarod again, I’m reading again (and not programming books this time), and playing video games again. Honestly, Spiderman Remastered was one helluva ride and the trailer for the next game has me on the fence for buying a bloody PlayStation 5.
And in the process of all this, I’ve also been trying out new things that have caught my eye. Cinema is one that has really intrigued me. Cinematography and direction in particular are something I dearly love. I used to just watch MCU movies (they were comfortable to put up on my second monitor while I wrote code), and now I actually pay attention to all the little details in the movies I watch. The last two movies I watched that I honestly could not recommend enough are There Will Be Blood and Knives Out. They’re both great watches and if you haven’t seen them, you are missing out big time.
Other than films, I’ve been thinking of game development as well. Coding has lost its charm for me because of how repetitive and mundane most of the tasks are. And game development in my eyes is art for programmers. It’s such a graceful combination of the two worlds, and I am excited to explore that avenue as a hobby.
I do think I’m going to repurpose this blog to go from a diary of a young programmer to the celebration of a multi-faceted individual (that I desire to embrace once again). I want to write film reviews about my favorite flicks (and the not so favorite ones), write about football matches and breakdowns, maybe even game development stories. Who knows where this’ll go, but I’m excited to break out of the shell of the 9 to 6 programmer for now.
I’ve got plans for a short film I want to direct, and I’m also working on a small game inspired by one of my favorite childhood games. For anyone else struggling with mental health right now, create art. When nothing else makes sense and you feel like you don’t matter, your art will remind you about your purpose. I’m a big Twenty One Pilots fan, and on my darkest day, I remember listening to Kitchen Sink and the lyrics just moved me and inspiring me so well.
So that’s it. There’s no big development breakthrough I have to discuss. There’s no fun programming tale this time. Maybe there won’t be for a while. But there’s gonna be more stories about life outside of just programming. And that’s something I look forward to.