whoami() - 11/04/2025

hello im aryan, im 24, been an sde @ aws for 2ish years, part-time masters student @ georgia tech for almost a year. i graduated in 2023 with a bachelors in cs from ucf. why am i doing a masters if i already have a job? kinda just for fun and mostly because i missed learning in a structured format. i wanted to learn more about ML and AI, as well as some specialized courses like high performance computing architecture. going through the program gives me a structured way of learning which works for me. i wasn't super passionate about computer science/software development/programming when i was deciding my major. i just picked it because 2 of my friends that were older than me did it. but i got into it my sophomore year after a DSA class. around the same time, i got this idea of wanting to work in big tech and spent a lot of time interview prepping and was fortunate enough to get an internship and return offer.
after joining aws - i started to learn a ton and still am. recently though, i started to think about why i'm doing what i'm doing for work, and why am i a software developer? an upcoming quarter-life crisis? probably. i still like writing code to solve problems, i still get a sense of satisfaction when the code works or its well written. there's a few things about working at company like aws. the scale of the things you can build is huge but the "cog in the machine" feeling is real. the ownership you have is great and the engineering culture/bar is high but you can't always control what you are building. i came to the conclusion that, while i enjoy and learn from my job at aws, i don't know what i want to do long term in this field - but i know i want to do and build things i care about and learn about things i find interesting.
so, until i know what i want to do, i'm gonna try to build stuff and learn stuff i think is interesting and try to write about it. maybe, i'll find my true calling along the way (building b2b saas) or maybe i won't, but at least i'll be doing it for myself. part of the reason i'm even writing this stems from consuming too much. i've spent too much time watching or reading about other people make or write cool things instead of creating myself. i realized that that's not the way i want to live my life. going forward, i'm going to be creating and learning stuff for myself and trying to write about it on this site, sort of like a blog. let's see where this goes!
exit()