SAbbAtiCAL - A 2nd Chance

SAbbAtiCAL - A 2nd Chance

The initial days of my sabbatical were terrific. They made me realize subjective concepts in a real sense that I couldn't figure out when I was doing my bachelor's in Computers. The reason was simply that I now hold practical experience. It was the time, as a student when I didn't have delusions of grandeur; I had an actual recipe for grandeur, which opened many doors for the future.

However, Steve Jobs once said, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." And it made perfect sense how beneficial this break was, which sharpened my skill set and helped develop my mindset, too, as I needed to hunt for daily needs because I couldn't work full-time as a Student. I started working as a part-time labourer making sure ration, rent and phone bills get paid timely.

Although I have experience, my biggest insecurity is that I hope people don't find out how much I don't know. "Networking" started making sense when I first configured a local mail server setup using Postfix, Dovecot And Squirrelmail in CentOS 7 in the college Lab. Honestly, I had never heard of all these "open-source" terms. The term "open-source" makes it clear to me that we could run, study, share, and modify as required. The more that you read, the more things you will know. It was interesting to know that all these things started in the cold war era. When the US Department of Defence created an agency named ARPANET to help maintain US technological superiority and guard against unforeseen technological advances by potential adversaries, in other words, to avert the next Sputnik. & if you watch the Netflix US-USSR subject series, these things make things more straightforward. :-)

The point is that it was a huge hit, and when I set up my first email account in 2003 - Yahoo! Mail, I hadn't thought about its history. It was the below quote that summerise EMAIL invention:

When the mail was being developed, nobody thought at the beginning it was going to be the smash hit that it was. People liked it, they thought it was nice, but nobody imagined it was going to be the explosion of excitement and interest that it became. So it was a surprise to everybody, that it was a big hit.

— Frank Heart, director of the ARPANET infrastructure team

The start of my sabbatical was full of surprise episodes and learning & then came the unplanned era - COVID-19!

To be continued.