My Dreams and Goals

A roadmap for myself to become an “excellent” engineer

I am Alwyn Raj, a Software Engineer with approx 2 years of industry experience based out of Bangalore, Karnataka. Currently, I work at Astra Microwave Products Limited as an Engineer.

My dream is to become an “Excellent Engineer”. When I say an Excellent Engineer, I mean the kind of guy in a team who can solve any problems, the kind of guy who gives the best engineering advice to people, the kind of guy who is not afraid to be scrappy and is able to learn from others, the kind of guy the manager calls over to solve any problem.

Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash

To achieve this, I have devised a set of habits I am going to take up. They are:

1. Embrace boredom
2. Consume “Good Content”
3. Fix my own problems
4. Explore as many Rabbit Holes as possible
5. Read — Engineer — Write — Repeat

I will go through each of these habits one by one and explain them.

1. Embrace boredom

A few days ago, I was bored and I was thinking about the Base64 encoding and decoding that we do on receiving data from a service.

I had not done any research on what it was at all, but I had been using it for a long time.

I thought that, as binary was essentially Base2 (namely 0s and 1s) and a decimal 10 can be represented in binary as 1010, if I were to “encode” 10 as base64, it would reduce the data size of the sent payload, thus requiring fewer resources.

As you may know, this is entirely false and poorly thought out. In fact, when binary is converted to Base64, it actually increases the data size by 33% because we are converting 8-bit chunks (bytes) of binary data into 6-bit chunk groups, and we use characters that occupy 1 byte to represent each group, thus making it 33% bigger.

The real reason we use it is because some older systems expect 7-bit chunks to interpret data correctly, unlike modern systems that expect 8-bit chunk data, along with a few other reasons.

I had no idea this was why we used it, and this was a great learning opportunity for me and a great rabbit hole to dive into. To get more of these opportunities, I have started engaging in a “digital detox” focused around my phone. I try to avoid spending my time on social media apps like Instagram and Twitter. I use YouTube’s new zero shorts feature to make consuming content from YouTube intentional.

2. Consume “Good Content”

Photo by MARK ADRIANE on Unsplash

Speaking of consuming content, the content I deem “good” are topics that revolve around science, languages, and one of my hobbies like cooking or gaming. To consume content, I try to use only my personal PC and not engage with auto suggestions that might not align with “good content”. I try to listen to/watch long-form videos and podcasts through YouTube if I am traveling.

I recommend content from GOTO conferences, Ryan Peterman, The WAN Show (for tech news), and a few other podcasts/conferences that are about tech or engineering.

Please feel free to recommend more of this “good” content if you have any!

3. Fix my own problems

I encounter lots of problems during my day. I try to keep note of all the ideas and problems I have throughout the day and try to solve them with software. For example, I am currently working on a project that helps me manage my finances each day and, at the end of the month, helps me analyze my spending patterns and plan for the future. (I know there is open source software out there, but I want to do it on my own for the lessons it might teach me. Every project I work on will be experimental.)

I plan to make all the code I work on available in an open repository on my GitHub profile.

4. Explore as many rabbit holes as possible

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I have always been intimidated by the Linux community, and I wanted to explore it. I have used Ubuntu for years, but I wanted to try the so-called hardest Linux distribution to install and use: Arch Linux. Also, the crazy customization people do with Arch + Hyprland was so cool, so I wanted to try it for myself.

After months of tweaking, I finally settled on a config I was happy with and was usable. It was such a rewarding experience of trial and error that helped me learn about Hyprland, the extensions, the small configs, and more things you can do to customize your device to your taste.

I would definitely recommend you try Arch + Hyprland. But the most important thing I took away from this experience is that jumping head first into the most complex topics and learning about them is super fun and engaging.

It taught me how to consider the advantages and disadvantages of different software. This is the reason I started on this journey to begin with.

5. Read — Engineer — Write — Repeat

I plan to read about software, tech, and problems, and I plan to engineer my own solutions to learn from that experience here. I plan to document my projects here and on Dev Community with the decisions I make, the pros, the cons, and the process.

About using AI to generate solutions is not engineering IMHO, if i want to learn about being excellent i should not rely on AI-coding tools to take decisions and complete tasks for me. So i plan to not use AI-coding tools on any of my personal projects from now on — unless the project is AI related

I plan to talk about my journey with software engineering in the articles i write and I would definitely appreciate criticism of my engineering decisions i make on my projects from the community!

Thanks for reading this article.