This is where I post regular updates on what I am learning right now or next and why. I know this doesn’t help you anyway, but it’s just a kind of journal. I will be glad if it helps!
12 August 2025
I am writing this aftermath of lot of thinking and decision making. You will understand how unstable I am.
There was a time not very long ago when I was thinking of giving up on software industry because this was not what I wanted to do from very beginning, but still did due to circumstances. Eventually, I made my peace with this industry, that too for a reason. I gave my chances with other potential careers I could go into. I quickly realised the fact that whatever new field this is going to be, I need to start from 0 (zero). That was the time when I realised how far I travelled from the very 0 (zero) in software industry. I am aware that I am no where near 20 even. But, I m definitely not at 0 (zero). I moved away from 0 on the positive axis during my past 3 years experience in job.
From this point, I started working on improving myself software engineering side especially with DevOps since that is where I have the most experience. I started giving a bit more in my job than I usually do because I have no other distraction in mind. At this stage, I am faced with new challenges at work intellectually, which is a good thing for me. Right now, I am working on something which includes dealing with media streaming. This exposed me to a whole new world of media systems engineering. I find it very difficult and interesting at the same time. I have this bad habit, if I know even a little of bit of something, I don’t pay much attention while learning it. If I feel I don’t know anything about it, I give my 100%. This is what is happening with me when I am dealing with media engineering. I know nothing of it and that makes it interesting to me.
I started digging this hole more. Hearing and seeing many terminologies but nothing seems to be understandable from light readings. After some research, I realised, this particular media engineering field requires wide breadth of knowledge and to a good depth in all of them. May be I am mixing my DevOps instincts too here. Heard things like FFmpeg, SFU, transcoding, etc. Even the explanations from ChatGPT on these weren’t helpful for me. I understood only a little bit that when I asked to explain like how it would do to a 5 year old.
I realised that I need to know systems engineering to good depth to understand a lot of these and fill my knowledge gaps on my way to understand media engineering to a good extent. I ordered and started reading books like “How Linux Works - 3rd edition”, and “The C programming language - 2nd edition”. You may wonder about my decision with C language here. I came to know that some of the important drivers in Linux kernel are written in C and while reading about Linux, I got stuck at understanding Devices. I don’t know if it is because I have a bird brain or that is normal. I thought, if I can start writing some code which is related to kernel, I might understand it better. I am this point right now. Trying to reading on Linux and C language.