Once more unto the breach...

For some reason I've been finding it really hard to blog these days. Every time I decide to blog, it inevitably slips my mind or something else comes up, or I'm just not in the mood. Maybe it's just laziness. Anyway, I've broken out of that long enough to manage this post. As I write this line, I still have no idea what I'm going to talk about. Guess I'll just relax and let the words flow on their own. Apologies for any incoherent babble that might result.

First off, Google just offered me a job at their Bangalore office. With a pretty devastating pay package for a guy just about to graduate. Apparently I didn't screw up those interviews after all. What's really scary is that if I do take it, I'll end up getting paid anything from 3-8 times more than everyone in my class. That is just scary.

I never really expected to land a job at Google even before graduating - TCS, Infosys, Wipro - they're easily within reach(unless they get wind of your GRE score :D). But Google, as we all know, is in a league of its own.

Most of the credit goes to TopCoder - if I hadn't discovered them, I would never have reached the level of skill in CS(that's computer science, not Counter Strike) that I have now. Problem solving ability is fine, but each discipline has its own flavor of it, and I hadn't really seen the true nature of it until I started TopCoding. Ok, so it's a little unrealistic for real world stuff - code at breakneck speed, think even faster, and so forth. But you can't do any of that without knowing at least some CS, and the more you know, the better you get. Maybe that's why so many reds are in graduate school. It's the same box of tools, you're just building something different.

And speaking of grad school, that's the second thing. I now have to decide between going to Google, or going to the US and getting that PhD. The university of Central Florida actually offered me a doctoral fellowship(what were they thinking? ;) ), so it's equally attractive. And grad school really is my scene. I've been waiting to get into that kind of environment for years.

Not that Google is very different - as Alan Eustace said at the Google Code Jam tech talk "We aim for a university style environment, but our food is better".

To be perfectly honest, I've already decided what I'm going to do. Of course, being the sadist that I am, I'm gonna leave it hanging and keep you poor readers in suspense. Some of you already know, though, so please shut up.

The question that's really been going through my mind is "Why have I been so lucky the last few months?" It all started with the GRE, and TopCoder. That really seems to have been the magic lamp that brought out the genie, because I've been kicking ass ever since then. All this stuff - Code4Bill, the Google CodeJam, the fellowship, now this Google offer. It's like my life is charmed or something. I can still barely believe that it was me that did all this. If someone had told me that I'd do all this stuff 2 years ago, I'd probably have laughed in his face.

My gut feeling is that it has something to do with heightened confidence levels(after the GRE) and finding something(TopCoder in this case) that I'm really passionate about. People who aren't obsessed with something - take my advice and find an obsession now. There is no other way to live. Pay no attention to people who tell you to have a sense of proportion - that's for normal people. And normalcy is overrated. Find something you really love doing and life will fall over itself to help you out. At least it feels that way to me.

Of course, there's still going to be some terribly boring stuff that you'll have to do. Get it over with and get back to what you love, and inevitably you'll have one of those incredible moments of achievement which will make all the boring stuff fade away. It's those moments that you've got to live for. In the end, that's all that life is really about. (Yeah, I read a lot of Ayn Rand. And yes, she's right about this sort of thing)

In 4 days, it'll be time for the 8th semester exams - the final trial, and then an end to this bittersweet saga of engineering. It's been an interesting four years. Not always happy. But interesting. I've learnt quite a few lessons, though a disproportionate amount of them seemed to be about dumbness and stupidity - either about avoiding it in myself, or escaping the effects of it in others...

It's time I returned to studying System Security. This time I shall make no promises about when I'll blog again, because they inevitably end up being broken. Public opinion helps, though. Toodle-oo.