About

There is an old saying, “You should leave your job when you feel that you have stopped growing”. It took me a year in HR consulting to reach this stage.

Between the 80-hour work weeks, churning of client slide decks, and preparing salary reports, I realized that the part of the job that I loved most was building systems with Excel. I enjoyed the process of creating excel templates that could churn numbers for me. I loved finding new ways within Excel’s ecosystem that streamlined the data analytics process. Hungry to do more of such work, I decided to take the plunge; I left my job to work on becoming a full stack developer.

Reflecting on everything I have learnt, I am surprised to say, I am most proud of my failures. Those failures came in the form of countless nuked repositories, lines of spaghetti code refactored, failed docker builds, and countless hours spent hunting for bugs in my code. But it is because of those failures, I can call myself a better programmer than I was a year ago.

The hours spent untangling spaghetti code taught me the value of writing clean and testable code. The time spent hunting bugs taught me how to isolate dependencies, diagnose problems, and fix bugs. The trial-and-error rollbacks on git’s version control taught me the importance of writing proper commit messages.

Even now, whenever I build something, something might fail. Bugs will show up, my container builds will not succeed, and I will find myself in familiar territory, rummaging through the forums on stackoverflow. But those failures serve as a humble reminder there is still room for me to grow as a software developer. There is an old saying, “You should leave your job when you feel that you have stopped growing”. I believe that I might have found the career that I was looking for.

This is a blog that holds a collection of my failures, disappointments, frustrations, and on rare occasions, my triumphs.