Lockdown Was the Best Thing to Happen to Me
I joined university for an engineering degree in the August of 2019. Few months down when the first semester ended and preparation for second began, the news about Coronavirus breakout came out (precisely on 31st of December, 2019). I remember reading about it but not paying much attention initially.
Fast-forward three months and it’s March. The virus is real and it’s spreading fast. My university announced an indefinite vacation. I was watching Linux content here and there (primarily the youtube channel of one Luke Smith. Luke, in his videos, demonstrated all the cool things that a Linux based operating system allows one to do. Things such as setting custom key-bindings, sending mail with just a few key-strokes, ricing your desktop and posting it on r/unixporn, astounding normies with your Vim skillz, you get the point.
Upon return, I got my USB drive, flashed Linux Mint on it, and wiped Windows 10 from the old, dilapidated laptop I had at the time to hopefully breathe a new life into it. And it worked. I was happy and excited to use it. I had things to do with it anyways.
I got started by learning how to use the command line - not just for a purpose - but how to live in it, as that is the primary appeal of a Linux desktop. I started writing simple scripts. It was so exciting to automate things that I started looking to write scripts for things that didn’t need them in the first place. I cannot claim to be a part of the Linux-clique without distro hopping. A couple months in, I switched from Mint to Manjaro to get a flavor of the pacman package manager. A few weeks in to using Manjaro, the pull of Arch Linux became stronger and I gave in. I spent three days installing arch, first making my nvme appear in fdisk, then fixing internet and audio. I had the “I use Arch, btw” privilege. I was happy.
All of this is right before LLM chatbots became mainstream. As there were no LLMs to write my bash one-liners for me, I had to resort to stack overflow, man pages and the wild internet to find what I was looking for. This was web-surfing, as it was done in ye olde times.
Web surfing is perhaps the most engaging, creativity-arousing activity one can do on the Internet. I was doing it. I discovered systems programming, open source, open source history, philosophy, small web like the gemini/gopher boards and tilde.town, obscure/esoteric programming languages, internet forums dedicated to hobbies, new music genres, personal blogs, discussion boards like hacker news and less wrong, academic websites of professors and phd students containing dense information about a subject, and a vast compendium of human knowledge available to be browsed and read.
I went from a coasting-through-life as it comes to aware and learned of what it’s about. Through philosophical forums and books, I learned what thinkers think about. Through programming/tech related forums and blogs, I managed to escape the tutorial hell that newb programmers find themselves into.
I had learnt enough to start a serious project. This was edd, a re-write of the infamous “STANDARD TEXT EDITOR”. Entering into a Comp-Sci degree, web development was the only area I was aware of. This period of stimulating exploration introduced me to the world of systems programming.
As if having linux as the operating system wasn’t enough, I started looking into replacing the bootloader too. Projects like coreboot provide an open alternative to the proprietary bootloader that comes with a laptop. Unfortunately, if your laptop isn’t supported already by coreboot, you’ll have to add support for it. This involves reverse engineering the bootloader, finding out what registers are available etc. I got an old haswell laptop to use as the subject of reverse engineering (as it is easier to rev-eng older intel chips).
Around the same time, due to my work with bootloader stuff and a general exposure to low-level systems, I landed an Internship at a startup working on FPGA based ML Accelerators. I got to work on things and at a level that I would’ve never known existed at the start of this period. This year marks the 7th year of this incredible journey. I will soon be joining a major chip company working on LLVM and compilers. While the Covid lockdown was terrible for the world as a whole and many people suffered, I owe my career to it and the Internet.