Yes! I was gone, and I took a very long-break from tech in general. I was still working as a software engineer, but I needed some time to introspect and watch inward. It seemed like I was so involved in the rat-race, chasing every shiny little thing, that I forgot to sit back and think if it was taking a toll on me. The tech-world has been developing so fast that it has become hard to keep on top of it....
Lately I’ve been noticing that my online presence has been all over the place. I usually keep my online presence organized by using a password manager and making sure I make a note of the online services that I’m a part of. Despite all that, I’ve been greeted with a lot of unsolicited emails, which—in all honesty, I’m tired of at this point. So I’ve decided that I would declutter my online presence and organize my online self....
For some reason that I don’t remember, I had ditched Fastmail for a self-hosted email setup. Which, then I realized, was a bad idea since self-hosting email is too anxiety inducing; at least if you don’t know what you’re doing. In my case, it was since I had no clue how the parts moved inside the self-hosted mail service. I just did it for the fun of it and maybe to learn a thing or two in the process....
Yes! I’m back blogging after a long break. Why did I leave? Not sure why, but I needed some time off from the shenanigans of the web and needed to spend some time offline with books, people and generally in the REAL WORLD. However, I did really miss blogging. Writing on my blog and sharing it with the world is an incentive for me to try out new things and get ahead of some crazy techie things that are happening on the internet....
Pixelfed! An ethical alternative to Instagram. Ethical because this decentralized network is run by enthusiastic users as moderators instead of the “Grow at all costs” corporation, which will be compelled to use your data against your own goodwill if that churns enough profits for them. The best thing about Pixelfed is that, it’s open source, and it’s self-hostable. If you have some spare space on your servers, you could spin up a Pixelfed server and interact with the rest of the Fediverse....
Testing is apparently the most important part in writing API’s since there could be so many ways the API’s could mis-perform, and you need some way to check for their authenticity of response. Lately, I was tasked with writing unit tests for the API’s in Golang at work. After a lot of trial and error, I figured out a way to organize my tests for better readability and maintainability. This is a quick and dirty rundown of my approach and, I’m glad if it helps you to organize your tests better :)...
We need standards, not tools The above line really resonates with me now. It was a while ago when I saw this lurking in my Mastodon feed and was lost with a scroll. Unfortunately, I’m not able to find the person who said it, but whatever is said, is true. It’s true because standards remove the Lock-In that is created by a tool and opens a person’s horizons to a new beyond....
Monthview, because I was too lazy to write “Month Review”; For real; And it sounded cool too. Doesn’t it? Well, this is not just one month view, since I haven’t posted month reviews since last two months (because they were boring). This will include the month reviews for February and March. This is going to be a long read, so brace yourself! Starting as a Backend Engineer! I’ve always been interested in backend development, primarily with NodeJS and Python (Django and Flask)....
If you had been following my blog for some time, you would know that I host most of my services on a self-hosted VPS. For those who are unfamiliar, it’s a computer located in a remote part of the world still enabling me to rent it, access it and host things on it so that me and other people can access it from any part of the world. Sounds revolutionary and exhilarating, can’t deny....
We all have heroes we look up to when we are kids, right? Ever since I was pretty young, I used to look up to other developers and wonder when will I get to do all these amazing things they do. Then I grew up, became a software engineer, and I’m already doing things that they do. But I genuinely feel there are certain things missing. In this post, I’m just brainstorming my thoughts on this....