[library of babel]

Summer Vacations 2024

An attempt to document my vacations

hello. okay, that is an awful start to a blog entry, but sure. perhaps i’ll gemini this later. this is an attempt to document everything I did in my vacations this year. i’ll write a follow-up every year. documentation brings accountability.

starting with, the obvious. the boon/curse in every about-to-be 3rd year’s life.

DSA - majority of my time

i primarily focused on leetcode (like everyone), cses and striver. somewhat neetcode here and there too. i’m not gonna focus too much on this although i definitely developed a love-hate relationship with dynamic programming. it’s certainly extremely fun (when you get it), and sometimes it sucks your soul out.

Library of Babel | Astro, TailwindCSS, GSAP

aka the website you’re currently on. i developed this inorder to keep a track of everything i have to read, and everything i do (gonna make a projects section soon, so many cool project ideas that i’ll hopefully eventually do).

this was a project i made purely to see if i had the capability to make something from scratch and also to ease my reading habits. i read alot, somedays i’ll read about UEFI booting, somedays i’ll read about Unicode character sets, somedays read about the Linux kernel. to collect all the cool articles in a single location, for me to revisit them. or simply, just to remember that i read something like this. it helps in recall, perhaps?

onto the next we go!

REDACTED | Next.js, TailwindCSS, Socket.io

confidentality agreements do not permit me to disclose much about the project. i developed this quizzing web-application for a client who wanted multi-device synchronisation as a priority. learnt about WebSockets, and Next.js through it. definitely gonna explore Next.js more in further projects. it was fun to work with, but somewhere inside i felt like i made a bad choice for a quizzing application?

honestly sockets were the most fun part of this entire project. they’re fun to work with, fun to debug. good experience overall.

OSTEP

the heading summaries it all i suppose, i read a lot about OS fundamentals through OSTEP. certainly one of the best books i’ve read. every chapter i read, i tried to find something related on xv6 to see how an actual implementation of the said theory looks. OSTEP is an amazing book - and if you’re reading this, you too should read OSTEP. it’s perfectly the kind of book I love to read, filled with practical examples, interesting citations, doesn’t get boring.

Distro-Hopping

oh boy, this deserves it’s own chapter for sure. when i was still in campus (college), i shifted from Ubuntu to Garuda Linux. i wanted something arch based, and also wanted Hyprland. Garuda seemed perfect, but effectively pretty bloated for my taste. and, it had it’s own fair share of unstability on my hardware. okay, to be fair - I was the one dual-booting it when they DO advise against dual-booting. okay, back to the topic. then, i went to NixOS. it seemed new, and sparked my curiousity. however, the learning curve seemed far too steep for the amount of time i had and thus, had to give up again. enter Manjaro Linux with sway! while installing Manjaro I blew up my laptop. somehow. that was due to some efi entries pointing towards some non-existing files? i do not know if that makes sense - my memory of that incident has certainly washed away with time. it took over a day to fix it, and get Manjaro working.

it seemed fine, until I came back home, then Manjaro wouldn’t work nicely with my multi-monitor setup. I switched to Kubuntu, and then similar issues. Finally, I settled down on POP_OS!. since then, i’ve been fixated on the distro. works perfectly ootb, everything works fine. although, i still have a wish to setup Arch Linux from the ground up and use it. let’s see what the future holds.

Reader’s Digest? Coder’s Digest?

probably my favourite part. of my entire day, of my entire life. recent stuff that has sparked my insatiable curiousity include