Hello readers, as the second ever post on this blog I would like to introduce myself. Even though I prefer my anonymity a lot, a blog without a name is just AI generated, unreviewed slop.
About Me
My name is Shashanka and I have been a Software Developer for all my professional career and a avid tech enthusiast. My interest in technology and how stuff works have been there since I can remember.
Even as a scared kid, absolutely terrified of my breaking my toys, I did open a few up looking at the internals, I cannot remember as to why the kid me was so interested in opening stuff up, but I was. For some reason I was absolutely hooked on magnets, I opened broken speakers, several toys just to find a magnet. I especially remember the big magnet I got from opening up a sizeable speaker, it had a weird shape, like a badminton shuttle with the base being the magnet and the rest made of metal. This was mid 2000s, the world as I remember it, was very different from now and who knows why we as kids did stuff we did.
Once I got into the later part of my school, I got very interested in technology, and all forms of technology. During Grades 11 and 12, I had a laptop, one that I had won in a Quiz competition, it was a very cheaply made one with no discrete GPU and a weak (IIRC) dual core processor. I had a teacher I respected very highly and he taught both Mathematics and Computer Science (and surprise surprise, those two subjects are the ones I liked the most). He taught C for us in those 2 grades and I absolutely loved tinkering and making stuff, the best program I made was a football simulator, it was just text based and it would very roughly (and I mean VERY ROUGHLY) take into account the quality of your squad and give you minute by minute score updates. Me and my friends in that class had some playing that.
Now comes college, and although people would expect me to say College was transformative, it really wasn’t, although there were some twists like I joined to study ECE but switched to CSE but the rest was very smooth smailing. I just got into Software Development and that was pretty much it. Participated (and usually lost) in Hackathons, built some stuff, passed courses and poof it was over. The ending was very underwhelming, with COVID interrupting my final year and a half of study.
After college was where things picked up again, maybe without regular assignments, exams and projects my mind was free to roam again. I joined immediately post graduation to my first job in Societe Generale, it was a French investment bank. With my first few salaries I bought myself a PC (Ryzen 3 3100, RTX 3060TI, 16GB of RAM at 3200MHz, and just 256 GB m.2) and then a mobile phone (S21 ultra). Then I got into Crypto currency, not as a trader but I was absolutely fascinated by Blockchain, I read a lot about it, audited courses and then by a stroke of luck, started mining bitcoin, made quite a pretty penny on it. Then Work From Home ended, I moved out and my setup stayed back, the income stream unfortunately dried down.
Slowly after I moved here (here being Bangalore) I brought my setup here, improving gradually, from a cheap 1080p monitor to a semi premium 1440p 144 Hz monitor and then to a 4k OLED 240 Hz Monitor (Dell AW3225QF), GPU went from 3060Ti to 4080Super, processor from 3100 to 5600 and then finally to R9 7900, storage is another story altogether and we will get to it.
Sometime in the past few years (2022 – 2024) I realized I was paying a lot every month on subscription fees for storage. I won’t classify myself as a datahoarder but I had a Microsoft Onedrive Subscription (1TB), a IDrive Subscription and IIRC sometime I even had Backblaze subscription, not that I needed all of it, I was experimenting with a lot of stuff and was generally interested in storage. I thought did I really need to pay this much every month for something I could probably hack up myself? I started reading about homelab’s and servers and self hosting services you need. So I contacted nearby people and OLX if anyone was selling Old PC’s as I didn’t need much computation power, I got a i5 (5th Gen) with the motherboard and case, for Rs 4,500 (like $50) and bought a 10TB storage and that was it, the start of my homelab journey. Although this will be a future blogpost, what started off as a small homelab with a few services like NextCloud, self hosted jenkins, several db’s like pg, mongo, …. and some stuff I made, now is much bigger and stronger (Ryzen 5 5500, 32GB of RAM, 40 TB of total Space, 2070S a GPU) and hosting a LOT of services I use regularly, even my family and friends use it, although that means I get “customer complaints” too.
Other than this, I love writing code, I cannot think of a period of 3-4 months in my life since joining college where I haven’t written code. Initially in college starting with Python and unarguably writing terrible code, and joining Societe Generale where I really learnt how to write, frame and design a code properly. Although my code still has a ton of issues, I think I have finally gotten the hang of writing Good Code consistently. Then joining IDrive (the service I used to pay for before) as a developer.
Although this About Me section was very little about my life of code and that’s intentional, as my resume probably highlights a massive amount of my exploits in that domain, I want this blog to showcase a different side of me. That being said, I still intend to write about code every now and then, with at-least one blog I have planned to write about Code Quality.
Ending with the fun (but boring) side of me, I love to play games. I play CS2 (not quite regularly now as the community is quite toxic and I refuse to pay for a third party service when Valve should probably take care of it), Single Player Managerial Games Like (Football Manager, I have logged thousands of hours on this game since 2021, F1 Manager and so on), games with Good Stories Like Plague Tale Series (absolutely without a doubt the best game series ever for me) and Open World Games like the GTA Series, Witcher, Mafia, Cyberpunk and finally Indie Games like Schedule 1.
I probably missed a lot about me here, as I wrote this in a single sitting but I hope coming blogs will showcase stuff I am really interested in. See you later 🙂
The Debugging Room 