How the hell did I manage to get a negative download speed ?! Screw hostel WiFi !!

HOSTEL WOULDN'T NOTIFY ME ON THE MAIL BUT LET SOME MOTHERFUCKER STEAL IT AND LEAVE THE COVER RIGHT THERE 😡
WAITED FIVE FUCKING MONTHS FOR THIS 🤒

!rant

I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.

So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.

My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.

I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.

This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.

So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!

When your internet speed is so fucking slow, you can't even git push 😢

My setup after shifting to my hostel
😑

Still an engineering student and hence cannot afford an expensive setup in my hostel. My current setup is

I have to do this every time I leave my laptop alone.
Hostel Life !

Last week, a company(start-up) came for campus recruitment.

This company was known for its long working hours, giving unrealistic deadlines to the employees, less recreational activities, etc.

Even though the pay was very good, some of them were there just to experience the interview process. All those waiting for the HR round, were half-hearted into the process.

This particular guy(a friend of mine) was so determined to be rejected from the company, that he intentionally screwed up his interview (final round).

Towards the end of the interview, the HR asked him to draw a map/path from his hostel to the building in which the interview was being taken.

Once my friend finished making the figure, the interviewer said “Take this same path, and get back to your hostel”.

SAVAGE!

Even though he was successful in getting rejected, the way he got rejected really crushed his ego.

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

A necessity for my non AC hostel room in the sweltering heat of Delhi, India.

I went to gym people there helped me to become fit.
I went to common kitchen in my hostel, people their taught me basics of cooking.
I went to learn code people mocked me for using Java(replace with any technology) not python(replace with any technology with swag)

I'm feeling empty. All my friends and roomates went home. But I stayed in hostel. I haven't touched my laptop from last 3 days. I'm just lying on bed staring at ceiling. I'm not even in a relationship, so I call my mother everyday to get the feeling of being loved.
This quarantine is strange. First few days I spent my time playing video games, watching Netflix, laughing at memes. But Now I'm feeling empty. Very strange thoughts are now occupying my mind. I'm sleeping 10+ hrs, and staring at ceiling or outside window most of the time. My room is a mess. Forget washing hands, I don't even feel like standing up to switch on lights.
I'm not saying I feel sad or depressed, I just feel very strange.

The hostel wifi's captive portal has huge images and super slow JS, Kindle can't handle that. Welcome to 2017

Hey there everyone, I stay in a hostel which tends to misplace all post, so I always have everything sent home.

And today is the day I finally received everything from the last six months that was couriered to me from home. I'm so excited. Finally got the devrant and WhatsMyIP stickers, the GCI and Twilio tshirts (The Twilio one is just too good) and also some cool handwritten notes. Loved it.

PS. Exams also ended today. So yay!
PPS. Now rooting for the stress ball 😂

Alright, my very first post here was about this project and I am thinking it out loud again.

I see a problem and I am struggling to find a solution.

Now what I am thinking of is to articulate the problem well and state WHY I believe it needs to be solved. There are some reasons which must be presented in a capitalist way.

Furthermore, I am thinking of doing a market research to understand various demographics, validate the idea, and figure out the product-market fit.

Now, this qualitative research and quantitative data will help me decide whether it is worth putting in the efforts to solve the problem or not.

And since, we have an MVP already (funnily yes, we built it before all of the above), that will help me validate the tangible solution.

Once we get a confidence boost, then it will be time to get that single transaction which has net positive cash flow.

Start scaling to 'next billion users', so a billion transaction with net positive cash flow.

I won't be branching out into multiple verticals before be able to sustainably scale the core USP.

And while the second half sounds like, 'I have a million dollar idea', I am trying to be more and more realistic and rationale instead of falling in love with my idea.

I don't even have an idea (read solution) to fall in love with. Rather I have a problem that is bothering me.

So, yes, I am continuing this journey to solve the problem which started in second year of my hostel room and has evolved over 10 years.

ANYONE IN SF THIS WEEKEND?

Tech company flew me out here and I'm here till Sunday!
Looking to party or just chill and explore the city/eat good Mexican food.

Staying at a hip hostel in Mission District.

Basic info: 23, Male, willing to walk forever

DM or hit me up on Telegram: camelcasesnakecase

#sfo #meetingrandos

Story Time.

I used to live in a hostel meant for professionals with two strangers in 2017, back when my salary was way too low to rent a flat on my own.

One afternoon I was just sitting around and looked at my contacts list which were about 50-60 people in total.

I started selecting people whom I hadn't spoken to for more than 6 months, and it was almost all of them except 2-3 people which were my brother, mom and dad.

Then I hit the delete button, I guess out of anger or me feeling lonely at the time. I wanted to see who remembers me or tries to reach out, given that I don't have their number.

And all these years later, it's still 2 people who I have in my phone contacts list. My mom and dad.

Since then, I am super exclusive to adding anyone's phone number to my list. I usually save their contact and start a chat on Whatsapp and delete their contact after for 6 months or more. When someone does text, I read their previous chat to remember who they are.

People come and go, but a corner of my mind wishes for that person who makes it into the list.
I kinda feel a little broken as I am typing this, but idk it might be the loneliness kicking in, idk. It is what it is.