The Midnight Sun

Category: Life

  • A roundup of my 2024

    2024 has been a good year for me and my family, and I wanted to share some highlights from it.

    Personal life

    Keirthana and I had our tenth wedding anniversary ❤️ at the beginning of this year (we have known each other for more than 32 years now!) and celebrated it with a trip to Murudeshwara (a long train journey that we enjoyed) where our daughter had her first beach experience.

    Statue of Lord Shiva, Murudeshwara
    Statue of Lord Shiva, Murudeshwara

    Our daughter also had her first flight, and her first international trip (to Singapore) along with my cousin who had his firsts too. A day trip to the Universal Studios at Sentosa was a highlight of this trip.

    Shrek Castle at Universal Studios, Sentosa, Singapore
    Shrek Castle at Universal Studios, Sentosa, Singapore

    We also had a memorable trip to Jaipur with family while presenting at the UbuCon Asia 2024 event held there. More details about that later.

    A beloved family member passed away in the middle of this year, causing a mix of sorrow and relief to the bereaved.

    Towards the end of the year, we managed to achieve some longstanding financial goals, which should stand us in good stead for the future.

    While there were some challenges throughout the year, we are grateful to have been in a position to deal with them well. 🙏

    Work

    I continue to work in the awesome Launchpad team at Canonical, and we have been doing a great job so far in coping with the departures of legendary colleagues (Colin and William), and the team growth has helped with it. This has given me a valuable opportunity to grow and provide leadership in specific areas (infrastructure, overall system design etc.) within the team, and I am grateful for that.

    At the beginning of this year, Keirthana and I had a stressful time when we had to assess our options and decide not to travel to the Canonical engineering sprint at Madrid in May. As a Real Madrid, I was really looking forward to going to Madrid, visit the iconic Santiago Bernabéu stadium, and possibly attend a Real Madrid game. 💔 But this tough decision had to be made due to a lack of reasonable childcare options for our daughter during our work trip. We were able to travel to The Hague for the second engineering sprint in October and also attend the Ubuntu Summit 2024.

    A photograph taken at the Den Haag Centraal Bus Stop, featuring the sky with numerous white clouds
    A snap taken at the Den Haag Centraal Bus Stop
    The Ubuntu Summit 2024 logo featuring a white stork with an eel in its beak
    Ubuntu Summit 2024 logo

    During the summit, I had the chance to meet and thank some inspirational people from the Linux ecosystem (Mathieu Comandon from the Lutris project, GloriousEggroll of Proton GE, Nobara fame, Neal Gompa, a prolific contributor to Linux distributions and a fixture in many of my favorite Linux podcasts), ex-colleagues, and friends (Soumyadeep Ghosh). I loved the Matrix 2.0 talk by Mathew Hodgson and the lightning talk by Nirav Patel from Framework where he successfully switched the Mainboard of a Framework laptop from x86 to RISC-V during the talk was mind-blowing!

    Keirthana and I presented talks at the UbuCon Asia 2024 at Jaipur in September. My talk was about ‘6 little-known features: How to make the most out of Launchpad’ and it was well-received by an audience containing a mix of many students very new to Linux and some seasoned, veteran community members.

    A photograph taken during my talk at UbuCon Asia 2024
    A snap from my talk

    During this event, I met Soumyadeep Ghosh, a still-in-college prodigy doing great work in the Ubuntu, Snap, KDE, and the open source software communities, and gained a new friend!

    I started learning Golang this year and have used it to build some toy personal projects so far. Python has spoiled me so much that I find it very difficult to pick up a new programming language. After relying on the ‘batteries included’ approach of Python and its standard library, I find the ‘So what if it is not there in Golang? We can easily implement it ourselves’ attitude of developers using Golang, very hard to accept. But this ‘learn, unlearn, and relearn’ process is very important for me to master, and so I will continue learning Golang in 2025.

    Hobbies

    Self-hosting

    I built my first homeserver (code-named, tesseract, because of the cubic shape of the Fractal Design Node 804 case that I used for the build) at the beginning of this year and moved all the local self-hosted services from the 2 Raspberry Pi 4s to it. I run Ubuntu 24.04 on this server with multiple ZFS pools having plenty of storage. Even though I have known about ZFS for a very long time (right from my college days as a Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador in 2008), I am grateful to the 2.5 Admins podcast (Jim Salter and Allan Jude, in particular) for evangelizing ZFS and nudging me to use it! I plan to convert all my computers to use ZFS, with tesseract acting as a zfs send backup target, soon.

    Gaming

    I continued to wade through my ever-growing backlog of video games this year, and managed to finish many more games this year than the averages from the previous years. You can see my posts about these games in this Mastodon thread. Here is a list of the games that I played and completed this year.

    • Venba (Xbox Series X)
    • Lovers in a dangerous spacetime (Steam)
    • Spiderman 2 (PlayStation 5)
    • Trine 3 (Steam)
    • Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty (Steam)
    • Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo Switch)
    • My Friend Peppa Pig (Xbox Series X) — I played this for/with my daughter, who is a big Peppa Pig fan
    • Journey (PlayStation 5)
    • Operation Tango (PlayStation 5 + Steam)
    • Trine 4 (Steam)
    • Astro Bot (PlayStation 5)
    • Plucky Squire (PlayStation 5)
    • Trine 5 (Steam)
    • We Were Here (Steam)
    • We Were Here Too (Steam)
    • Marvel’s Midnight Suns (PlayStation 5)
    • It takes two (Steam, 2nd playthrough, this time as May)
    • SteamWorld Dig 2 (Steam)

    As you can see, most of the above games have cooperative gameplay of some sort and that is what I have enjoyed the most this year, playing with my cousins during weekend nights. Astro Bot (I preordered it) was my best game of this year and I enjoyed every moment of it and got the Platinum trophy at the end.

    Astro Bot game cover image
    Astro Bot game cover image

    I attempted emulating my Nintendo Switch games using Yuzu (RIP!) before Nintendo took it down and then came back to stop all development on Ryujinx too. I swore off Nintendo due to this, but I suspect I will buy their games and consoles in the future because they do make excellent games! ☹️

    I had an on and off relationship with my Steam Deck and played some games on it, without completing anything meaningful. SteamWorld Dig 2, Dave the diver, Cult of the Lamb, Borderlands 2, Yakuza 0, and Psychonauts 2 are some honorable mentions. You can find more details about it in my Steam Replay 2024 showcase.

    I bought game discs/cartridges for Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Metaphor: Refantazio (I loved playing Persona 5 Royal), and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom during my international trips, and I am yet to play the last two.

    Gadgets

    I bought myself an Aorus FO32U2P 32-inch 4K 240 Hz QD-OLED monitor to add to my existing BenQ EW3270U 32-inch 4K monitor, and it has been great to use so far. Since there isn’t a GPU that can run most of my favorite games at 4K 240 Hz, I will have to wait for a future GPU upgrade to be able to use the full power of this monitor. I chose this over the cheaper Alienware AW3225QF monitor because this doesn’t have a curved display and has more productivity features than AW3225QF. I still need to iron out some issues/limitations with my current setup to make the best use of it.

    Aorus FO32U2P 32-inch 4K 240 Hz QD-OLED monitor
    Aorus FO32U2P monitor

    Ever since Apple released the M-series MacBooks a few years ago, with trailblazing compute power and battery life, I have been interested in buying one and running Asahi Linux. So this June, I bit the bullet and bought myself an M3 MacBook Pro laptop with the M3 Pro chip, 18 GB RAM, and 512 GB storage. While the Asahi Linux project doesn’t support it yet, I am happy to wait and use macOS till then. I have been using it as an “on-the-bed laptop for personal projects and entertainment” device so far, and have written this post on it.

    Furthermore, I bought 3 more TP-Link Deco XE75 mesh routers during my Netherlands trip to allow extending my home Wi-Fi network’s coverage and/or replace any existing devices if they fail. This was important to me because the Wi-Fi 6E/7 mesh routers are no longer sold in India due to some uncertainty around the licensing and usage of the corresponding radio bands for Wi-Fi or telecom mobile networks. I hope this should suffice for the next 5 years or so.

    Podcasts

    After listening to and supporting Jupiter Broadcasting network’s podcasts for nearly a decade, I stopped listening to their shows this year because of the excessive bitcoin shilling (I hate cryptocurrencies) that took the focus away from the great content in those shows. It looks like they have been doubling down on the bitcoin stuff since I stopped listening, so there might be no way back for me. ☹️

    The Late Night Linux family of podcasts have been as great as ever and provide a lot of excellent content. 2.5 Admins is my favorite podcast and I can’t wait to hear its every new episode.

    I am currently evaluating ‘The Untitled Linux Show’ and so far it has been enjoyable.

    FOSS contributions

    This year, I have continued my recurring donation to the KDE project and started a new monthly donation to the Matrix project. If you haven’t done so, I strongly recommend donating/contributing to the FOSS projects of your choice.

    Gratitude

    2024 was a memorable and an eventful year, that ebbed and flowed every day. We are thankful for all the good and grateful for the privileges that allowed us to deal with the not-so-good well. Looking forward to a great 2025 ahead! Wish all of you a happy, prosperous, and fulfilling 2025! 🎉🙏

  • The birthday greeting card masterpiece

    Today is my wife’s birthday and after hearing that her nephew had made her a greeting card, my 32-months-old daughter decided that she had to do something to top that.

    So she took her scribbling notepad, took all her crayons and scribbled all the colors she had one by one singing “Happy birthday to you amma!” for each color and gifted the result as her greeting card immediately after.

    😘

  • Balloon, joy in small things

    Balloon, joy in small things

    Today, we took our 20-month-old daughter to a toy store for the the first time. She was excited to be there and was eagerly looking at everything. While she pointed to a few things that caught her eye and said that she wanted it, she didn’t cry or protest when we ignored her requests.

    A free balloon given to her in that shop was all that she needed to have an unerasable grin 😃 on her face for the next few hours and ignore everything else!

  • 2018: A roller coaster ride

    2018 is almost over and it was an unbelievable year! It took me through a myriad of situations, experiences and emotions and I can barely believe that I was able to get through.

    My daughter was born in the beginning of the year and it was an amazing experience being a parent for the first time, in spite of being clueless about bringing a baby up. Holding the tiny bundle of joy in my hands for the first time and the days gone by seeing her grow up very fast, have all been surreal.

    Just a week after the birth, while I was on paternity leave, I was laid off along with hundreds of others in a workforce reduction and the division I was working for, was wiped out from Bangalore without a trace. It came out of the blue and though there were attempts by the local management to re-hire and re-purpose at least some of those affected, it was too little too late. It was an unbelievable shock and it took everyone affected, a long time to recover.

    I had injured my shoulder while playing badminton towards the end of 2017 and was advised a surgery to fix it. I had planned to get it done during my paternity leave and was in tatters due to the layoff.

    I applied for some jobs via referrals of friends and acquaintances and got a couple of job offers. But there were some issues to consider before I could accept any of them – daily commute to office being one of the major factors. I received a job opportunity from my previous company to work for a different team and given my circumstances, I chose to accept it and joined in a new role soon after.

    I was a part of a new team with everyone else in the team including my manager working in remote locations, with a couple of interns/new joinees expected to join me a few months later. The work was in a totally different domain and I was never able to mingle with the folks and the work environment didn’t feel the same.

    I took a fortnight off and had my shoulder surgery which was a minor procedure. It was a very traumatic experience because of the poor care provided at the hospital in spite of me repeatedly warning them about it. I was advised to do physiotherapy for 2 months to regain full movement of my right shoulder and that didn’t go well after a while – the hospital was too far from my home and the hospital refused to provide on-site physiotherapy after a while. Later, the hospital had some issues at the management level and almost all the doctors including the one I was consulting, quit the hospital and moved to a different hospital which was even farther. 🤷‍♂️

    I read the monthly ‘Ask HN: Who’s hiring?’ posts on Hacker News regularly and came across a job posting for an interesting remote job as a senior open source developer. Just out of curiosity, I applied for it and though I never expected to get a response, I got one in a fortnight’s time. I had an interview with the company’s CEO and I was given a job offer soon after.

    The next couple of weeks when I had to think about the job offer and make a decision were tough. Though I was laid off and re-hired immediately after, I was in a very comfortable and familiar job with a lot of employment benefits. On the other hand, I would have to work on an hourly basis as a self-employed contractor in the new job and without any employment benefits like paid leave, medical/life insurance etc. But it would allow me to permanently work from home, spend time with my daughter and also avoid the headache of daily commute in the mad Bangalore traffic.

    I bought a used car (a silver grey Hyundai i20, 2009 model) to gain more driving experience after my driving classes in the previous year and also to be able to drive my family when required. I had vowed to never buy a car since, imho, I would be inconveniencing myself and everyone else on the road given the Bangalore. But the incessant pressure from my wife made me cave in.

    During this time, a close relative who was ill for the past few months passed away. He was a fatherly figure to me and I was very close to him right from my childhood, having been brought up in a joint family he was a part of. It was an unbearable loss that shook the whole family and I was no exception.

    All the chaos in the first half of the year till that point made me decide to continue with the status quo and continue in my current job. But a last-minute call with my colleague, friend and a mentor changed my mind and I ended up writing my resignation letter instead of an email rejecting the job offer.

    I joined the new job in the second half of the year. Though the work and pay were very good, there was a two-month trial period which made me very nervous till I successfully completed it.

    My wife went back to work after her maternity leave and though there was support from my in-laws to take care of our daughter, it was always going to be temporary given their preferences and way of life. Given, my parents continued to keep away from us, thanks to my father still being mad about my marriage (even the sight of my daughter didn’t change that), we had to take whatever help was offered under any condition.

    I took my wife, daughter and a cousin on a long drive towards the end of the year in my car and it was an amazing (but tiring) experience and helped me get more comfortable with my car (My wife is still fighting with it 😜) I also bought myself a new laptop, but haven’t set it up fully for work yet.

    This month, we did our daughter’s first hair shaving and ear piercing ceremony and it was heartbreaking to see her cry continuously and be very cranky for many days after the ceremony, thanks to her fever and a bout of common cold.

    Next year is going to be very challenging as she grows up. She is already very active and naughty and things are only going to get worse 😉 My wife’s office is not willing to support her to take care of our daughter any more and with my in-laws planning to go back some time in the middle of the next year, it is just going to be the three of us and one heck of a journey. 🤞🏼

    Here’s to an awesome 2019!

  • Feet off the ground

    Feet off the ground

    feet_off_the_groundIn the past month, I have had my feet off the ground for most of the time. I got married to my sweetheart, we had our first air travel, we celebrated our honeymoon at Taj Mahal just a day off Valentine’s day, getting our own 2-wheeler which has given me my precious first full-time driving experience (though I have a valid driving license 😉 ), booking our own flat near my office. Let me ride this wave of happiness as long as it lasts 🙂

     

  • A dream of 10 years

    I cannot just say it was a dream come true. It was a dream of 10 years. A tree we both had planted as a sapling and nurtured for. Even now, it feels too good to be real. We both kept asking each other “Has it sunk in for you?” and the answer was and is still no. It’s the reality of taking up the responsibilities and managing both office and home that’s keeping my feet on the ground.

    It was a journey that had literally everything – Happiness, sadness, anger, joy, love, fights, heart breaks, life altering decisions, commitments, problems, solutions and what not! You name and we had it in our relationship. Yes, love is not just a fairy tale. It takes a lot to keep it up and I learned that well.

    After so many twists and turns in my story, there was the day. Finally! Feb 9, 2014. I couldn’t sleep the previous night due to a lot of factors – tension due to the thriller adventure my marriage story took and excitement that the big day was just hours away being the major ones. My friends forced me to sleep saying that I should get some beauty sleep and finally I dozed off. The day arrived in a swirl and swept me off. I got ready and came to the temple which was the marriage venue. I was so restless since I had arrived before him and I didn’t take my eyes away from the entrance. Only when I saw him, my lips curved and the smile came out. The one that reached from my heart to my eyes.

    After that everything went so fast and before we could realize, he had tied the mangalyam around my neck. After that nothing mattered to me, everything went in a fit of emotions and blur. I didn’t care, I couldn’t even if I tried. The only thought in my mind was “We have done it.”. The marriage being a simple ceremony helped in many ways since the tediousness was reduced to a great extent and we were still fresh for the grander reception which followed a short while after.

    The trip to Delhi and Agra was indeed a romantic one with a visit to the Taj Mahal being the heights of it 😉 Now being back to Bangalore and having joined office, the routine work and added responsibilities have brought us back from the clouds. Still, everyday I wake up with a smile, knowing that I am with him. Good or bad, we are in it together and that’s exactly what we wanted for the rest of our lives.

    Here’s a peek into the biggest day of my life! 🙂

    IMG_20140209_064741

    IMG_6063
    Until later 🙂

  • Happily ever after

    Happily ever after

    start_of_a_journey

  • I do

    I said the above words and that is how my marriage got fixed and is going to happen on
    9 February 2014. 😀

    What made it even more special was that it happened on her birthday.