Who? Why?

No, I'm not gonna start my first blog with, 'Hey there, Welcome to my blah blah...', this is going to be more of a personal tracker-cum-blog.


The first question, Why did I start writing blogs?
The answer is simple (or ig it's not). It all started with a series of incidents over the past few days. One of them was a meet with one of the faculty coordinators of the college club I am a part of, and the discussion revolved around the fact that the the full-stack development industry is shrinking, especially with the rapid growth of LLMs that can write code in a flash, taking over the need for full-stack developers in the market.


But why did that make me start writing blogs?

I pondered on it and asked myself, what have I been doing? For the past two years, I've been working on full-stack development projects, learning more about FSD tools and technologies. Was all of it a waste of time? Is full-stack actually dead? How much part of my work was being done by AI? Is this the full stop to my developer journey?

Speaking of my developer journey, these blogs are going to be about just that. The knowledge I gain as a developer every day will be a part of what I'll be writing in these blogs. These blogs will help me document my journey and they might even push me to learn something new every day, hopefully helping me answer the questions I’ve raised above.

Who?

Well, I'm Imad, a computer science undergrad at CBIT, Hyderabad. I could've been studying some other engineering at an IIT, but, ig, my love for tech pulled me here (no, it's not the high-paying jobs in the computer science field 😭, kind of, but not really). If I wanted to pad out my bio, I could brag about my FSD projects here, but honestly, there’s no point in doing that.


What am I doing now?

I've worked on countless FSD projects and helped a lot of people build theirs too. At this point, I've even lost the track of how many projects I've built. I've participated in dozens of hackathons but luck hasn't been on my side, never managed to win one. Recently, I took part in an ML hackathon with my coding buddies (side note: ML always felt beyond my reach before this). This hackathon taught me more than I’ve ever learned before, also developed an interest in ML. I owe a lot of my learnings especially in the field of AI and ML to my genius pal, Omkar ☝🏼.


Another interesting project I’ve started with one of my friends, Muzaffar, is PipeOptimizer. It’s an ML project aimed at optimizing CI/CD pipeline performance. Most of my blogs in the coming month will probably revolve around this project. A huge learning curve where I'll be learning both ML and CI/CD through this project.

UpskillFam, a community built by Nihith and Ajith, is another thing I’m a minor part of. I contributed by helping build and set up the platform (yet another FSD project 😭).


I’m also looking forward to being a contributor to an organization in GSoC 2025. I’ve been exploring organizations and projects, but the same questions keep coming up, what stack? What technologies should I focus on? FSD? Yeah, because that’s what I’m good at, but again, the competition in FSD projects will be massive.

Something I’ve realized is that I should focus on lesser-known organizations and projects with fewer participants. My plan is to become an active member of their forums, ask questions until I fully understand the codebase, the project, their objectives, and everything else. The next step would be to start contributing to their repositories before the GSoC applications open.

To prepare for this, I’ve been looking for “good first issues” on random GitHub repos to familiarize myself with the contribution process and learn from various repo maintainers. This journey alone has been an entire story, but I’ll save that for another time. I’ll probably have a few blogs, or maybe a lot more, on the GSoC experience if I get selected. Fingers crossed 🤞🏼.


So yeah, in the coming blogs, I’ll probably be writing about all these topics. I don’t want to get into the internships part because, honestly, that’s been a total mess. Maybe it’s because I can’t sell myself, or maybe I’m not as good as I think I am? Whatever the reason, I’ve stopped applying for internships (and no, don’t lecture me about giving up too early, I just feel internships aren’t my thing right now). I just don’t want to pile too much on my plate and end up accomplishing nothing. That said, if one comes my way, I’ll gladly accept it.


P.S.: If you’ve read it this far, thanks for sticking around. Stay tuned, let's see where this takes us (me😭)