Too much noise

Everyday they drop a new bomb in this field, don’t they?

Anthropic just dropped another major development: they made AI agents create a c compiler which compiles Linux, Postgres, Redis and even Doom. You can read about it here

Being ahead in curve

I think about this quite regularly. Software field has become too much crowded. People obsess over getting better not than themselves, but better than others. Why? Because of money, fame and what not. Apparently software provides a fairly straight path to stable job which can pay your bills.

Sure, it does pay my bills but I did not enter this field because I wanted to pay my bills.

Beauty, layes, android

My one of the earliest memories of getting introduced to programming is hearing about C++. I got to know that is a prgramming language, I am talking about sometime in 2015. A friend of mine told me about backbox operating system and how some prople use it to hack instagram profiles.

All this was fascinating to me. This is also the time I got introduced to rooting android phones. And I did, I followed a youtube tutorial (with Avicii song in background) and flashed a custom ROM in one of the older phones.

At one point I even got worried when I learnt about how Google application need to installed separately¹. I mean, imagine an android with no playstore. This was first time I looked at this as an abstraction layer.

Yes, I realized how everything in software is just another layer that engineers have put to hide the details from people operating above that layer.

Linux

What did I do next? Well, I followed another video and setup a virtual box vm with Kali Linux. The objective was to learn to hack instagram profiles, ofcourse. But I learnt more about Linux through this experience.

CS

I happened to join IIT KGP and attended plenty of CS courses, including information security where I got introduced to CTFs, OS and networks. I solved a few CTFs with my other system nerd freinds and it was fun.

COA + OS

I got hooked into COA and how OS abstracts your code. How it runs your code. I read about systems whenever I got chance and started documenting things as well. I installed Arch Linux (yes I use Arch btw), and setup everything from the bare bones (no hyperland, mind you) with bspwm + polybar + sxhkd + dunst.

If all of this feels alien to you, don’t worry, I am a very big nerd about controlling my things down to a lower level detail. And I like it that way.

Open source + tinkerer

I am a tinkerer by nature. I do software because I am mad about software. I started open source and contributing to other codebases because I like this idea of free software.

People that inspire me

• Tsoding
• Nir Lichtman
• 3B1B
• Vsauce

What next and Why?

Because software is layers upon layers of abstraction hiding elegant chaos underneath. I want to understand it all, from registers to distributed consensus. I want to perish in doing the impossible to drown in this ocean of knowledge, and maybe, just maybe, surface with something new.

And I want to setup a self hosted homelab so that I can do cool shit there. I dream of owning a garage one day with my experiments, content with my own shit, unbothered by the crisis outside.

See my experiments here: https://sneaky-potato.github.io/notes.

If the ideas mentioned in this post excite you in any way, please contact me via email: ashwanikamal [dot] im421 [at] gmail [dot] com

I would love to chat with you.