November 2023 Retrospective

November has passed, and temperatures have been nose-diving here, ranging between 1-12°C lately. For the upcoming week, it is expected to dip as low as -2°C. Overall, November felt slow.

Additionally, we have shifted to a new home, which I also mentioned earlier.

I have joined a remote startup, which is an online education academy where I work part-time. My role is definitely not related to Dev or Ops there. Therefore, I am still applying / open for entry-level roles that are related to SysAdmin, DevOps or Cloud.

👨‍💻 Development

Earlier in the month, I set up a 3-tier DevOps project on AWS with the help of Terraform Ansible. Then I played around with Nginx - as a web server and proxy server and learned how to build Nginx from source.

I also experimented with Tailscale and found some good usecases for it.

• Creating a VPN with Ubuntu & Tailscale
• Remote Access Mac File System from iOS/iPad

📚 Read

In the month of November I read:

English

• The DevOps Career Handbook (Review)

Urdu

• The Revival of Religious Sciences by Imam Al-Gazali رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ, Vol V, which completes the series.
• Tafseer Siratul Jinan Parah 8
• Falsafa -e- Jihad by Abde Mustafa Publication, explaining on the real essence & meaning of it (PDF).
• 10 Question & Answers on Science
• Hazrat Abdullah bin Zubair رَضِيَ ٱللَّٰهُ عَنْهُ
• Faizan e Imam e Azam رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ
• Faizan e Imam Bukhari رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ
• Imam Malik Ka Ishq-e-Rasool ﷺ
• Faizan e Imam Shafae رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ
• Faizan e Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal رَحِمَهُ ٱللَّٰهُ

📝 Writing

My writing streak for November has been frequent since the onset of the month, and I have written a total of 12 blog posts, which is an all-time high for any month. You can check them out here.

💻 Courses

I enrolled into two major courses:

• CSS for JS Developers by Josh Comeau - grabbed in Black Friday Sale and a friend did the courtesy.
• 100x Devs by Harkirat Singh - 5 months long cohort which I joined primarily to learn backend & system design.

I also brushed up my Tailwind CSS knowledge.

🍿 Watched

• The Railway Men - TV Mini-Series. A friend recommended this and it was totally thrilling & relatable to Chernobyl. It is an Untold Story of Bhopal 1984 in Indian Hindi-language. Basically a historical drama about railway workers who saved many lives during a 1984 toxic gas leak at the chemical company Union Carbide India Limited’s plant in Bhopal.

🛒 Shopping

I got two new books in hardcover:

• Tehreerat e Luqman from online AM Store
• Allah Walo’n Ki Batain from local MM Store (Set of 5 Volumes)

📈 Analytics

These are the site analytics from November 1st to 30th. There have been almost double the number of visitors compared to the previous month.

✍🏻 Closing Thoughts

Today marks the start of the 100x Devs Cohort, so for the next few months, I will be upskilling myself and working part-time. In the meantime, if I receive any offers for WFH related to my domain, I will opt in for that full-time. Wish me luck 🤞🏼!

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