May 2020 : #30DaysOfSharing

Day 1.

As of today, May 1, I have been at home for 57 days.

This is a difficult time for all of us - the uncertainty around when life will go back to normal is giving everyone varying amounts of anxiety. I am the kind of person who likes to have a plan, and then stick to it. I don’t always do, but I like having it. I am probably the least spontaneous person you will meet in your life. So when my internship at Microsoft ended on April 10, I felt a bit lost. I didn’t have a project to work on anymore, no work to look forward to updating during Scrum Meetings, no 1:1s with my manager, no accountability. I had been toying with the idea of building my website and write blogs but two things kept coming in between me and the final product:

1. Lack of time to finally get a website up and running

2. The feeling that I am neither an expert in the field nor have been around for long enough to claim being able to help anyone

However, yesterday, I got my hands on the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon and there are certain things he said that made me get this website up and running, from start to finish, in a couple of hours. I started building the pages, bought a domain name, got the welcome page ready and today, I am starting this post. Here’s what he said :

- Give what you have. To someone it may be better than you dare to think.

- The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.

- Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide. If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.

So here I am, getting over my fear of being vulnerable and all the criticism that being online brings with it. I guess I needed that final push and I got it yesterday. I am not perfect, I will never claim to be but I do think that I have done some things right which worked in my favor and brought me where I am today. The only thing I want to do is share my experience with the hope that it will help some of you out there too. I love watching Day in my life vlogs (don’t judge me already 🙄), not only of engineers but doctors, lawyers, students in other countries - I think it brings a new perspective and if you pay a little attention, there is something to learn from everyone.

I think I have spent enough time in the last couple of weeks having boomerang good and bad days adjusting to this new ‘normal’ life. All of that ends, today. It is a new month. It is a new start. And I fully intend on making the most out of it. Life gave me lemons, and I want to make a Lemon Meringue Pie. This 30 day challenge is supposed to do a few things:

1. Get me used to blogging - being consistent is key, and that takes some amount of effort and energy. Having a challenge attached to it will hopefully make me consistent.

2. Make me accountable - like I said, I want to share things that I am learning in the hope that they might help you too and we can all be in this together.

3. Give back - I cannot say this enough - I am where I am today because of the people who decided to help me. There were a lot of people who didn’t and I don’t want to be one of those people - we all need to look out for each other. “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” And that’s what we need to do - be dwarfs sometimes and giants, when needed.

Day 1 : Sharing this website. Welcome to my new online home. I hope you like it here :)

Please leave a like & a comment if you like this post and let me know what you’d like to see on this website. It will help me make content better suited to the needs of the people visiting.