So, the other day I was browsing a blog post and my train of browsing got me at sourcerer.io and that’s what sparked this whole train-of-thought.

I am a multipotentialite, jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none whatever you want to call it.

I accept that I am not absolutely mindblowingly “awesome” at anything. I might be good at a few things, slightly better at some topics — but I will probably never accept the fact that I’m a “pro” at anything. There’s just way too much to learn out there about any given time!

Anyway, coming back to the discussion at hand – I came across sourcerer and seeing those visualizations, it mesmerized me. Here’s a back story for why it was mesmerizing: As a kid I used to think I need to be a “pro” at at least one thing or my life won’t be worth anything, I’ll probably never get a job, blah blah blah.

But being someone who has been working for over 6 years as of 2020, I realised that I didn’t have one place in my job history that would say that they didn’t like my work. I’m not trying to brag here, but that made me realise this one thing. The industry really does look for people who have mixed background experience. My whole thinking of “you need to be a pro” was all wrong.

Now the reason why I found sourcerer visualizations mesmerizing was because it captures super accurately of who I was and how I grew over the past years, one commit at time.

It captures all the tech stacks I have worked on and accurately measures which stacks I’m more proficient in as compared to the others. Me being a multipotentialite, I was always under the dilemma of how to answer the “tell me about yourself” question. I had never gone in deep with one specific thing alone.

Over the years, I realised being a multipotentialite with experience across multiple domains is never a bad thing. In fact it’s more often a boon than anything since all the chunks of knowledge that you gained from one place or the other, even though it might not make sense — you’ll never know when it comes in handy.

While working at Network Intelligence, I used to hate writing Logstash parsers. Yes, I know hate is a strong word, but trust me — I did.

Turns out, the knowledge I picked up from there came in handy in fixing a broken parser for Fluent-bit a year down the lane.

With all those realisations in place, one fine day(today) I was browsing through all the repositories I had created for an idea or something else. While I was at this, I stumbled across a gold mine. Well, not a literal goldmine per say but it was this old dusty repo with no commits in it in the past 3-4 years. This was my TIL log repo.

Here’s what it looked like:

I read through the contents of this and I felt really good about where I was back then and how much more I knew from then. Basically, this was a log of anything random, sort of like a copy of my brain.

Realising that I started there and ended up here, and remembering that no one is born a "pro" — I decided to open source it.

So I’m going to commit and continuously learn as I always have but the only change being, I’ll make a log of it from now on.

Who knows what I’ll do with it, probably just read through it and feel good again like I did today.

So after a bit of restructuring, I moved everything into yearly buckets just so it becomes easier to manage. You’re going to see “commit on 29-08-2020” but the content is right from the year where it belongs.

Here’s to embracing and being comfortable with who I really am and not trying to change and “fit-in”.

Here’s a link to my TIL: https://github.com/arjun921/TIL

Peace ✌🏾

Last modified on 2020-09-13