Last time around this time I was in chaos, I could say I'm still in it... By entire life is ig at this point, and I'm in the process of acknowledging, that regardless of whatever I do... It's inevitable and I just gotta fight through it all. This specific chaos was however was because I was in the verge of taking probably a Life changing decision. Life was getting back to normalcy, I started working Full Time as a DevOps Engineer at OHCN, I had a routine. I was building cool things. The stuff I made was being used to deploy and support Healthcare in different Indian States. But right about then, the call came from my past of unfinished Business. As I had paused my degree to become a lil' bit more financial and emotionally stable after the roller coster ride of 2024, And I had recieved an Email from the Admin that had approved my request to resume my degree. I was at the verge of a gamble, Going back means, I'd loose my full time job which was bringing sanity and stability to my life. And going back as a SUPER SUPER SUPER senior and sitting with a bunch of kids that are probable 3-4 years younger than me was not at all SUPER. Anyways I decided to take the leap, Step out of my comfort zone and get back to NITC. Upon asking what am I supposed to say ?? For the general public and people around me, I was still working and my deals with NITC has come to an end... and I went on ahead with that lie.
Now, a normal person's goal will be to not at all involve in anything and simply just finish up the degree and run away, Ig at first that was my goal also.. As Swathi had rented out an apartment to which multiple nicknames were given including but not limited to "AristoKaavu", "Kaadu" etc, which was also supposed to be the HQ of the Aristocrats, The Design and Architecture company. I kinda told a few others that I've resigned from my previous job and am working on this said Architecture company as their IT solutions Engineer, Which I still was. As things started getting real I transitioned into an Intern, AGAIN. and went back to campus. Keep in mind my earlier promise of staying detached from the Campus was reinforced with me staying in AristoKaavu which again is 1500 Feets from Campus.
Now to dive into my Love Life, I've seen the world out there, the version of me who left campus in 2024 was not the same as the one who was back to campus in 2025. I've got comfortable working with Many Cloud Native solutions, and also nix thanks to the flaky bois. Just before Coming to campus and starting the semester, I created a poster and sent it out to random kids in bulk.
The goal was to ask almost all of them to bring old PC components, laptops so that a cluster can be setup to deploy Workloads easily. The project was Named GLUG INFRA. This was deeply driven by my fascination, around the fact that I could manage multiple machines with a single repo being the source of truth, As the semester had begun, I saw a large number of inflow of hardware components and I called up a bunch of B24s to work on them, and hack around at the aristokaavu. that didn't really last long as like I said those 1500 Feet really does keep you kinda detached from campus. And as the semester progressed I did many tries to get this ready again... My original intention was to setup Postgresql, Mysql and S3 Storage etc as pure nixos services powered by systemd services, and I went that path itself. I dived deep into how to get self healing systemd services and found my self lost, In between I headed out to Taiwan to give a talk about OHC and CARE, and then came the Midsem-Exam and I found "better things to do" and kept the INFRA shelved.
2026 I was back on this again and one specific message that I received changed how I viewed at this entirely. This message came to the bridged Group chat of the Flaky Bois, It was from Sinan, he told me nix can and shouldn't ever be replacing K8 or Terraform, and it just clicked. It was around at this point that I was trying to adopt the same standards of GLUG Infra to My work as well. And trying to bring on about nix to the heavily python specific environment at work was HARD. I saw a lot of threads that explains the horrible nightmares of a situation where you could see nix and python at the throats of each other. fueled by this I decided to rewrite the key django repo that powered these Servers onto rust so that it's so much easier to work with and deploy with nixos, but again like sinan said, what I was trying to do here was replace the orchestration layer with nix. which is not needed. All I needed was a good setup of K3s and it shall give me the things that it was made for, and nix was supposed to be used for what it does the best, which is managing the underlying infra in hand.
I carefully architectured the GLUG infra deployment stack out of sleepless nights and tiring amount of screentime, mostly rotting in my bed. I've spend hours on my bed working on this I feel like It's more or less like a relationship rn. And all my efforts that I put into it, no matter whoever appreciates or don't appreciate I feel proud that i was able to go through this. I know half of you who read till this point expecting tea into my dating life might just feel disappointed atp. But this is actually the story worth telling others, atleast to the people who really care about tech and now the most important part.
Why am I doing this ?? what is driving me ?? what satisfaction am I getting by writing code that converts useless and abandoned PC into this so called foot soldiers of GLUG infra, I'm bad at every day things, things that need attention, I once told someone that I bring Mr. Bean energy into whatever I do, Disaster finds me wherever I go and I am starting to believe that it's really just result of my severe lack of attention, often I feel lost in the world that is moving too fast around me. I feel Lost in my cycle in a highway as people around me are buying bikes and cars cruising with cruise control turned on. I still keep that Dhanush's Song that goes on like "Lokame speedaai Odipokuth... En Vandi (Cycle) Puncture aayi nikkuth"
At points I thought I was back on track again, not really driving alone having my backseat warm but even that became just a cluster of cold lies said by a ghost which I can't find no more. And as I lost, and spend hours days crying over the fact that the seat which never at all was warm went empty I realized I should just stop caring about that and start putting in more of my efforts into others that I love. 99% of people will still think I'm a fool for the things I do, I still have obsessions to do things my own way and regardless of all the pains me or anyone around me have to endure, regardless of whatever I break on the way to that sense of "rightness" I can't sleep till I'm there. I keep telling myself I have strong instincts and I gotta go by it. Is this lack of will power or lots of it I still have no clue.
And as all these thoughts cloud up in my brain, Like ponjikkara once said...
When I start drowning and spiraling into my thoughts I'd just think of how can I build resilience to my infra and setup disaster recovery, or how to improve the performance of the workloads. I gave a promise to the kids who brought in pc components and laptops, that I'd setup the Infra before I leave campus. and So I did, set it all up migrated everything to it and now I am at peace. Everything I ever had in mind fit into it's place like lego blocks.
I still have more distance to cover I need to setup archiving, build more resilience, clean up and compartmentalize a lot of code, But my ❤️ for Computers still grows stronger, I sound a lottt like a hypocrite and idk feels irky to write the next lines, I like to think I'm trying to contribute on helping those who follow me find ownership and freedom in their lives. Recent hiccups in my life is makin' my stand a little weak as I often does find it troubling to do it myself. Maybe it's just I find more time and resource to look into the outside 'cause my sight inward is lacking, the blog is low key turning into a self diagnosis, moving on I have this strong feeling that if at all at somepoint my actions lead to my juniors taking up and using the services I provide, Including mediawiki, also other building cool tools for campus and for in general, helping them host their workloads onto my cluster etc sounds exciting. I just hope that atleast in a distant future I see students grinding on their dreams by building cool stuff instead of hurdling through DSA, doing project for the sake of projects.
There are N number of Problems out there around us, Problems the ones we love and care about are facing, the ones I prioritized were preserving the history, enabling accessibility to knowledge, building communities in a healthy space etc. and the love for all these drove to dream about building solutions that could atleast be an option for those who need it. To utilize it or not it's not upto my hand.. I don't know for how long my obsession with this place is gonna last. For my betterment I think I should slowly slowly end it as soon as convocation. Who knows, I just hope I get to give back a fraction of what I tool from this place back to those who follow me.
I love you if you reached this far ❤️. And here down Below You can see me explaining about the same during the KOCHI FOSS meetup of May 2026