This is a bad time to start writing again. I’m currently in the middle of my preparations for applying to colleges in the United States and it’s not going as fast as planned. It’s the first of November, 2018, and most of the colleges I plan on applying at have opened their applications forms. I’m aiming at the West coast, specifically California. Mostly because I’ve travelled there and the place seems to be teeming with a creative culture especially in the domain of technology… I mean, it is called the Silicon Valley.
I’ll be applying to the UC Schools, Stanford, Caltech, and a few others. I’ll be honest, the California Institute of Technology is my dream college. And no, not because the characters from The Big Bang theory play in there but because it’s so hard to get into. No. It’s because of it’s reputation and all the things I’ve heard about it — how challenging their curriculum is, how it’s reserved for only the brightest minds only, and sure, that intimidates me but if I do get admitted, I’ll be willing to work so hard that I make sure to can get into their list of noted alumni.
The past few weeks have been really rough but I’ve managed to made through them. The syllabus for Chemistry and Physics just never seems to end. However, I am making progress in them, especially Physics. Mathematics is going as good as ever though.
It’s 5:32 AM and I’m kind of delirious. But I just knew I had to write a post before the end of this week. Oh, I just realised that it’s Halloween for my Western neighbours. Happy Halloween, guys. Hope you get a bunch of candy and rot your teeth. Just kidding. That brings me to the topic of dental hygiene. Pretty random but I keep it in my top ten priorities list. I don’t know what the other nine are but it’s really important to me that my teeth are always shining. So much so that I’m afraid I have a case of dental hygiene OCD. No, I’m not pretending to be one of those teenagers who seem to complain how bad their compulsive disorder is just because someone left their door open. It’s just annoying when they do it. I don’t mean to sound patronizing but Obsessive Compulsive Disorder isn’t something light. Trust me, if you did have OCD, you’d have gotten it verified by a doctor soon enough because of your parents / guardians.
Going back to the topic of mouth cleanliness, I’m one of those freaks who brush more than twice a day. My record till date is six times. I never had to be told to brush my teeth because I have a horrible mouth after I wake up. I can almost melt stainless steel with my breath. It’s so bad that even I can’t stand it in bed and have to drag my feet towards the washroom.
This is such a random post with such a thoughtful title — “A New Time”. I started writing this yesterday but was called to dinner and so now I can’t remember what I had in mind. Perhaps because I was writing something after such a long time, I felt like I had to make a comeback. Apparently not since I’ve not successfully wasted quite a bit of your time by making you read about my opinions and views on oral sanitation.
I’ve also been quite active on my development side. I’ve started a new project I’m calling GetSetDB. It’s a simple database shell that lets people create database and store data in the form of key-value pairs. It might not sound fascinating to you but know this — it’s my 12th grade Computer Science project and in a curriculum where the most advance projects created are simple tic tac toe games and hotel management systems, this is a pretty new and exciting idea. Or I’m just a huge egoist but so far, a few of my friends have complimented my choice so I think I can brag a bit. Other than that, while scrolling through Github, I found a few repositories recommended for me and I found this — Django-React-Blog. The name’s pretty self explanatory. I looked at it and found it interesting so I cloned it and went to work. The first thing I saw was that the code wasn’t in a really good condition. I mean the project worked no doubt, but the author had ignored some common PEP 8 coding conventions and hence, I spent some time working on making the code look more clean.
The next thing I did was adhere to a few Django specific conventions. For example, Django urges its users to use tuples wherever possible. It was mostly for the Django Rest Framework which has something called permission_classes which, in simple terms, defines authentication levels required to access specific views. Yup, that’s in simple terms. Never mind.
I feel like I should explain that more but this is more of a relaxed post. I don’t want to go too nerdy on you. Starting a blog where I document all my experience building stuff and explaining my thought process of difficulties faced to other people seems like a really enticing idea… but at the same time, I don’t want to populate my Medium account with all of that. Maybe I’ll start it on another platform. “But Manan, aren’t you a programmer? Can’t you just build a custom blog for yourself?” Yes. Yes, I can. In fact, I’ve done it — Blog. AND I have a frontend written in React for it — Blog Frontend. But I don’t have the resources to deploy it. I’ve considered hosting the whole thing on my laptop but it just doesn’t seem feasible. Blogspot seems like a good place but it’s too much eye candy for a tech blog. Tumblr is too political, not that there’s anything wrong with it. LiveJournal… no one uses it. Twitter, yeah right.
I dunno.
This post’s getting too long. So… I’m just gonna post it.
