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The Context
Sep 2026
Sep was an extremely, extremely busy month for me. I can slowly feel the heat around and it’s getting extremely difficult and very competitive here. I loaded myself with as many difficult courses as possible and started exploring unexplored territories, so everything takes a lot more time than usual to wrap my head around. I had to catch up on the prerequisites while doing my coursework, which is extremely difficult for me right now. The best part is that I’m exploring some unexplored domains. My main focus for the next four or five months, at least until December, is operating systems. the reason? just to have fun and learn new things. I’ve always wanted to go in depth, understand, and be comfortable with how the computers we use work internally. I think a lot of the design principles,db design etc we use today were inspired by operating system design, so I wanted to explore how an operating system is built, not just theoretically. Theoretically, I know it, and we learned it in our engineering courses, but I want to learn it practically by hacking the kernel and tinkering with it. It takes an insane number of hours every week to wrap my head around it, play around with it, and figure out what to change and where. That’s going to be the main theme behind the next four or five months.
I’m also going deeper into distributed systems, where I’m focusing on implementing these ideas and strengthening my fundamentals. Since I’m learning operating systems and networking at the same time, I’m trying to connect all these pieces and tring to strengthen my fundamentals. Fortunately, I found the research lab I’ll be working in for the foreseeable future. That lab mainly revolves around building systems that can scale agents. It’s basically a distributed systems lab, but the workload is more about agents. The lab also has a mix of very interesting people: folks deep into ML inference, core ML folks, core systems folks, and people like me somewhere in the middle. So I have to set aside at least two hours a day for my research lab, on top of coursework, which is also time consuming. I think it will be really fruitful experience in the end.
The best part about this month is exploring my favorite job, which is teaching. I fortunately got myself a teaching assistant position, and One of the interesting things I did this month was build my own teaching materials. They’re entertaining and give a lot of value to the reader, and I’m trying to dumb things down so that a large section of my class, who are undergrads, doesn’t get overwhelmed. I want to help them understand the concepts efficiently. This is something I’ve never done full-fledged, and I’m trying to make the most of this opportunity by experimenting with a teaching style that’s efficient and entertaining at the same time. I’m also improving myself operationally. That includes figuring out the class, getting the materials right, handling all the operational stuff, making sure things are graded, making sure people have the right access to ask questions, doing office hours, etc which I would usually outsource to others,now I am making sure I learn and do it myself. I’m also focusing on communicating efficiently in class.. I’m slowly getting more confident in the things I know, so that I can convey them efficiently to others. That’s why I’m taking every opportunity I can to talk and present my work, so I get constant feedback on how efficiently I’m teaching.
At the same time, LeetCode keeps bugging me, like I said last month. I couldn’t find time to practice it, and I underestimated how difficult the job market is. I have to spend at least an hour or two every day to just randomly apply to jobs, because you only get opportunities if you apply. That’s something I need to do next month. But I’ve loaded myself with an insane amount of workload and can’t take on anything more, so I’m trying to figure out time for it somehow. If I mess this up, next summer is going to be really difficult for me.
The biggest learning this month is learning to say no. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been overwhelmed, because I’ve said yes to things I could have said no to. I’m coming from India, where opportunities are scarce, so every opportunity I see here feels valuable, and I try to catch hold of all of them. But because of this, I’m starting to feel I can’t concentrate on the things I’ve already promised to do. I’m slowly realizing that doing few things very effectively with full focus is better than doing ten things half-baked. Even though the opportunities are very interesting to be part of, I’m now slowly starting to say no to them, because I’m loaded for the next four months until Christmas. I think I just need to focus and do what’s on my plate efficiently, since that will be more valuable at this point.
Also, I somehow finished my dev vlog. I struggled with it, but I pushed it through. yayyyyy
Interesting reads:
The more I dive into distributed systems, the more I understand the value of reading research papers. A lot of what we find online is just surface level, while research papers are very helpful for exploring the depths. There are also insanely cool blogs from official companies like Netflix, Uber, etc., but the problem with them is they come up with solutions without talking much about the history. They don’t say what problem caused the solution or what technology existed at that point, and most of the time they miss those points. That’s why when you talk to somebody, they just randomly start with sharding and all the terms they find in designing data-intensive systems. My goal now is to read historical papers from the 90s and 2000s onwards, which were very influential behind the technology.
This helps me connect the dots efficiently, so that’s the side quest I’m focusing on. There’s just too much yay noise around, and the whole reading experience feels a little bad right now. So I want to pivot to influential research papers, which are evergreen. I’m learning a lot from them. Unlike today’s papers, each one is very dense, around eighteen to twenty pages with a lot of content, and exploring one paper takes me about a week. I’m documenting what I read every week here, so you can take a look, and if you want to read the same paper, you can always pick it up. paper readings
Books I read this month:
As for books, unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish any of them completely. But I started reading some books I got from my senior, and I started The 48 Laws of Power. I’m reading one law every day, so hopefully I’ll finish it in forty-eight to fifty days. So far it’s not great. It feels like an evil book, but I’ll keep trying to finish one law a day. Since I have a few books in reserve from him, I’ll keep reading after that.
I also started rewatching anime, so every day I watch one episode, around 23 to 24 minutes. Some days my book reading time goes to that episode. I really enjoy it, and it’s currently the only relaxation I have. I deliberately wanted to add it to my life, because otherwise things are already bad, and I don’t want my mental health to go for a toss.
So the theme of this month is that I wanted to be more ambitious. I signed up for a lot of stuff, and I understood that’s not the way to go, because it feels super overwhelming. So, starting next month, I’m trying to cut things off and focus on the stuff I originally wanted to do, so that I can barely survive the next few months. The goal for next month is to build the habit of applying to a lot of jobs. I want to be in the interview loop and figure out what they expect in this market, especially in America, so that I can start preparing accordingly.