Thinkings

These Things Are Much Better Than Spending Time on Résumé

Preface I have been reviewing a lot of literature related to the job market in software engineering and analysing what stands apart and what gets rejected. While writing this article, I am at a very young age and I am very grateful to say that I had an opportunity to interview people for hiring them into a startup, despite my role as a DevSecOps intern (I was that one multi-tasking startup guy).

You Need to Do this to Get An Unfair Advantage in the Software Engineering Market

Preface: This article is about my experiences and opinions based on my knowledge. We all have an unfair advantage since we all are unique and using that to get better in the market would take you much further. I have been working with software for like a few years while being a university student and learnt a lot from all the amazing people I worked with and followed. While I put down things that I learnt, it has to be noted that your opinions and experiences may vary and I greatly respect that.

The Future of Work and Lifestyle - The Inevitable Change in Thinking and Growth

The Current System of Workspace Working for a company or an organisation to become financially stable surely makes you and your family proud, and certainly, when you were in the 90s, that’s what most people termed as widely successful. It’s absolutely important to make money to have a nice home and send your kids to a good school. And most of the time that works and maybe certainly enough. This method of surviving has dominated for a while now and has shaped the current workspace.

There are always Flaws — Malware Development and Exploitation of Control Flow

Disclaimer: The Author of the article does not hold any opinions of facts other than computer technology. Everything here is as per my research and may not be fully accurate (although I tried my best). He is a very simple person and a computer nerd so information in this blog must be taken with a pinch of salt. I have been studying Cyber Security since an early age and know a few things about it till now.

An Old Computer’s Teachings — Why Vintage Systems Can Make You an Expert

On June 10 1997, Apple Computers released the Apple 2 computer which was one of the first mass-produced computers in the world. It was a success and had a sale of 5–6 million units till the year of 1993. There was a small documentary on this by Bloomberg Originals (here on YouTube) about the same with Steve Wozniak. Now I am not a 90’s kid or something. I was born in the year 2004 and had no connection with these computers.

A Minimalist System — Philosophy Behind Terminal-based Applications to Suckless

Since I have been using Linux for most of my life till now and while I started my computer usage on the Windows Operating System (at a very early age), terminal-based programs have been a life-changing things for me. I have been a person obsessed with minimalism and simplicity in everything. While I spend most of my day in the cyber world, I like to have my computer workspace as minimal as possible.

The Alchemy of Open-Source Software — Community and Freedom

Disclaimer — The following blog post contains the very personal opinions of the writer and is not intended beyond the scope of stating views about the Open-Source. The author respects the opinions of each individual so take it with a pinch of salt. Open-source software has been there for a long time since the software industry started to get into some shape. Open-source is not just a way of developing software but a value that makes individuals in the community contribute to making their skills useful to the world.

The Arch Linux Tales: No Wi-Fi for Today!

I have been using Arch Linux for days now for the sake of having full control over the hardware as well as the software (not moved to LibreBoot or CoreBoot but someday in the future). I have been utilising the suckless utilities and ricing my system for the best look I can have and take the privilege of saying “I use Arch BTW”. Since the total control of the Hardware and Software falls in the hands of the user and Arch repository Pacman releases even the latest packages, way before the software is even stable creating a sensation of being the early user of the tool at the same time being ready to crash out the system.

The Alchemy of Open-Source Software — Community and Freedom

Planted January 13, 2024

Disclaimer — The following blog post contains the very personal opinions of the writer and is not intended beyond the scope of stating views about the Open-Source. The author respects the opinions of each individual so take it with a pinch of salt.

Open-source software has been there for a long time since the software industry started to get into some shape. Open-source is not just a way of developing software but a value that makes individuals in the community contribute to making their skills useful to the world. Lots of smart people out there have so much talent into them which can have a great impact on society, and it may be a case that they are under-estimated by the corporate world. Even it may be a case that a well-paid software developer might have a thing or two to donate to the well-being of society in the form of software. Nonetheless, the values are the same, to have greater freedom and more access to the software by as many people as we can.

If we just move our attention from just the software perspective and look at the way sites like Wikipedia and others distribute knowledge and learning for free without any return and survive on donations by the community as well as corporate firms is invaluable. I just can remember how handy Wikipedia has been for the whole of my school life and the majority of my high school for studying subjects in depth. I am currently studying computers in depth but back in the days when I used to study Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, it was these free websites where I focused my attention towards. It was not the case that I hadn’t had access to paid stuff but it was my preference to use the works that are done openly and freely on the community. Even today I use Wikipedia to study and reference topics when I study books or even just scroll through the website in search of something new (the best thing about it is it’s very handy while using the Lynx browser running on the terminal on my Arch Linux and refer to topics while writing code is something awesome).

In the same way the spread of knowledge works, it’s the same for software distribution. One of the very successful and used Open-source projects is Linux. Linus Torvalds while studying at university started a hobby project of developing an Operating System which was Unix-like (Unix was licenced back in the day) which would go on to be free and open for contributions to all. It turns out that the project went on to acquire almost 96.3% of all servers out there (while writing the blog). Android, which is one of the most used Smartphone Operating Systems uses Linux Kernel. Linux got into various places and continued to be free and open for contribution. Linux Torvalds (while writing this blog) has been maintaining the Linux Source Code for more than 33 years now. People have been contributing and fixing issues in Linux and the whole project has got its nerves into the community.

The impact of open source can be seen almost everywhere. A lot of things that you use and are unaware of using open source software that has been built with near to no cost, by the community and not a big firm after a tedious hiring process. I believe that in today’s day if you are awesome enough to be bold, you can get your computer running with no paid software (given that you are ready to maintain it with no external support other than the community). You just have to get paid for the hardware. All the nerdy work you need to do can be done as it is with these tools. I use Arch Linux (btw) and run suckless utilities and even my browser is open source so I can have a look at the source code and confirm the possession of my data. In case I get any issues, I can resolve them on my own and even contribute to solving the issue for others. Find a bug and you can get it resolved on your own and further fix that in the repository.

Richard Stallman went on to start the GNU (GNU not Unix) Project where he supported the use of Free Software and a lot of tools that we use today are built under it. The Linux terminal usually uses the bash terminal which was made by the GNU Project. The tar, libc, more, make, etc and a lot more tools were built by them that we use today without acknowledging the people behind them. It’s not a single person, but a whole community behind them.

GNU Project: https://www.gnu.org/software/software.en.html (List of all the tools that were built with GNU)

Linux GitHub: https://github.com/torvalds/linux

Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/

Wikipedia Article on Open-Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source