A group of individuals with common interest plan to meet to share their knowledge and network. This is my definition of a Meetup. I have read several blogs about meetup's but never attended any. I did not plan anything nor did I know about this meetup until a day before. It was just on the spur of the moment. I am glad, I attended this meetup and hence sharing my experience through this blog post.

I have no clue what made me register on the meetup.com website. It was Friday evening, I was about to wrap up my daily office work. I pointed my browser to meetup.com and registered. The website popped at me a meetup that was happening on Saturday 05th of Oct 2019 from 10.00 AM to 12.00 PM. The host were sharing their experience about React with Typescript == React on Steroids. Interesting. I wanted to learn about it. Unfortunately, RSVP were closed. "I could always watch about such topic on YouTube", I thought.

Surprisingly, someone in the comment had mentioned that no need of RSVP, everyone is welcome. I did not have any excuse but attend.

Smartphone's and in turn social media plays a very important role in our life, without which we would be stranded. Right? To a certain extent it is the truth. We use social media because we want to be connected. But we forget the toll it takes on our life through its continuous usage. In this post, I go through my journey from a social media addict to being a social media ghost.

First, a little background. I had an important feature delivery in the coming week but due to personal work, had to take two days off on a short notice. This meant, I had to complete my current development tasks. "No Problemo !", I thought. My inspiration for working overnight comes form the movie, "The Social Network". I have mentioned about how amazing the soundtrack of the movie is, umpteen times, here on this blog. This essay is my retrospection per se on working overnight.

Work commitments of an important feature delivery and family never go in hand. You will spend more time working compared to the time spent with family or honing your hobbies, the universal accepted law for the software professional by the software professional, always holds true.

Writing code is fun, interesting and fulfilling. However, debugging is an equally important skill. Solving an issue sometimes may give you a taste of hell especially when you are not aware where to look for the root cause. At first, a defect may look simple, but figuring out what to debug and where to hunt demands for attention. Today was a fine morning, after sipping my coffee and afresh, I was sure I would destroy the task at hand point blank. Fate was not on my side and I hit a roadblock. I spent almost 2hrs trying to figure what could possibly go wrong, most of the time starring at the screen clueless. I needed a different perspective.

Computer science is the most sought for specialization in Engineering colleges, at least that's what I've heard. When I entered my first year of college, I barely knew that Computer science means theoretical study of computers. Even though we had the best of the syllabus, I could hardly relate the theoretical knowledge with the practical world. Despite of having practical hands-on sessions on almost every subject which I think constituted 20% to 30% of the time we spent in the entire course, I found it difficult to understand the concepts. This was around 12 years back.

Assuming that the current curriculum consists of theoretical knowledge, how can one outperform in college? After having a decade of experience, I try to explore and answer the question, "what advice would I give myself if I were back in college?"

I am a avid reader of HackerNews, I like to read about start-ups and I love to work with code. I started my career as a programmer working on web projects. I have had experiences working independently and with a huge team. In this post, I try to pen down my experiences as a software developer and some of the things I learned throughout this journey.