In this article, I want to document some tips and tricks I employ to make sure my house stays clean, more often than not. Why do I feel the need to write such an article? Because I think the default state, especially when you live alone, is to not care much about your house feeling like a dumpster. Also, thanks to our very adaptive minds, one quicky gets used to whatever surrounding they’re put into. And if I go down that route in the future, I’ll need something to spring back.

The other question is why I feel qualified to write about such a topic? I think that I’ve come a long way from my little flat that I rented towards the end of 2017, to jumping between several flats in Berlin and then learning some important aspects of living solo, many of them the hard way. Depending on your current circumstances, this article might seem off topic or too basic. Two years ago I would have found this article to be irrelevant as I was living with my parents and our house would clean itself (or so I thought).

Okay, so without further delay, let’s jump right into the guide.

Put things back when you’re done using them

In very simple words, whenever you take something out of its place, put it back after using it. That implicitly also means that everything has to have a place in the house (and if it doesn’t, check if you even need that thing). Just having everything in its place already makes a huge difference to how organized the house looks.

The best part here is that you don’t have to find extra time to do this. Just use any buffer time you find in between tasks to organize stuff. For example, when I’m waiting for stuff to cook on the stove, I put away all the cutting boards, knifes and spice bottles back to their places so that when I’m ready to eat, it is just the pot of food and my dishes out on the kitchen top.

Don’t leave dirty utensils in the sink overnight

It essentially takes the exact same time to either wash your dishes at night or in the morning. But the great feeling to see a clean empty sink in the morning is well worth pushing yourself to do the dishes before you go to bed. As an added bonus, your house stinks less over time.

Prevent, don’t just cure

Or in other words, don’t wait for dust to become visible on the shelves and fridge to stink before you start to think about doing something about it. Just like you wouldn’t wait to drink water up until your kidney hurts, make a cleaning schedule and stick to it irrespective of how unclean you felt on the particular day you planned to vacuum.

I prefer doing it in the first half of Saturday so that it feels like I have a shiny house for most part of the weekend.

Use the inertia to your advantage

The bad news is that if you get used to keeping your house just a notch above a hygiene meltdown, it will want to stay there and getting it back to normal would require significant effort (and probably a third party professional cleanup if you’re particularly good at not bothering with cleanliness).

The good news, similarly, is that if you keep it clean all the time, you’ll notice that if you skip cleaning a particular week (say you were travelling or just too tired), it wouldn’t feel terrible because the house is virtually just as clean. That’s just things wanting to stay the way they are, and it is easy to see how we can use it to our advantage.

Have visitors

When everything else fails, there’s this external motivator that works like a charm. Have people visit you from time to time. Bonus points if you have people who’ll visit you without or with very short notice. That way you’ll be forced to keep your house clean just out of the fear of embarrassment if nothing else.

Get motivated from within

I know, this one’s the hardest. But think about it this way: Why do people like going to the gym and working out? Or eating salads? Or studying? It is because they want to achieve the goal so desperately that they’re willing to put up with some hardships, that too with a smiling face. I feel like that’s the same with many things, including this one. You clean reguarly, not because you’re super fond of vacuuming the carpet, but because you like sitting on the couch on a saturday evening with the lights dimmed, chill music playing and everything smelling like a flower garden.

In closing

I hope that was informative. Caring for my place has made a huge difference to how homely I feel in this new city. No matter how tiring the day is, there’s always this one place, the place, where I can go at the end of the day and zone out of everything.

Thank you for reading

A question popped up recently in my office from our content team: What are the web development trends for 2020? It was directed towards us, the dev team, as it was assumed we might know a thing or two on this topic. We did suggest a few things here and there, but to me that spawned a deeper thought on what are the ‘trends’, if I may, that I’ve seen in professional web development that I personally care about.

An alternate and more appropriate (and perhaps a tad less clickbait-y) title for this post would’ve been…

What web developers actually talk about?

And I’d only talk about web developers for now, because one: that’s the people I spend a lot of time with, and two: the stuff we usually talk about hardly ever makes it to a magazine article listing trends. So, without further ado, let’s get right into it.

Talks about ethics in tech

Ethics, especially in tech, is part of every other conversation that we have. Many engineers I work with, and many I’m friends with care deeply about doing things right (with each of us having our own definition of what that means). I feel glad and fortunate to have such values driven people around me.

Cooking

We talk about cooking from time to time. We also cook good food sometimes, and sometimes mess things up. Food being such a basic necessity that it surprises no one that so many people have, at some points in their lives, taken cooking seriously.

Comics

A couple of us are also into comics. Reading, and sometimes even making. Most of us are very much into memes, but this is specifically about comics. They’re different, right? I think they are, but can’t explain how.

Clubbing

Back in college, my lack of exposure to many developers and the idealism of start years had led me to believe that developers hate doing anything that’s not to do with their computers and code. Clubbing and partying would’ve been the last things I’d have guessed a coder to do, but hey, we all learn.

Beer Making

That still does surprise me, but hey, why not?

Trying the new AWS stuff

Many of us are on our own side-learning quests. Someone is excited about learning Go while someone else is trying their hands on machine learning. We talk about it often, and share the material that we work with. Sometimes we even show each other code from our pet projects.

Native technologies

We often discus the new features that browsers ship, new paradigms that help better software development and make us better software developers. Frameworks come and go, but paradigms, patterns and best practices stay. ReactJS might not be here five years later, but separation of concerns might not become irrelevant anytime soon.

Web developers, especially the ones who work with JavaScript, know very well how volatile things can get, and having an idea of what is ephemeral and what not is critical.

Hiking

Hiking is something I got into because of my cousin. It is far less common back home than it is here in Europe. Here, many people around me frequently visit the nature and mountains. They bring back good stories from there, and one of my personal OKRs this year is going hiking. Let’s see how that goes.

Going back home to see friends & family

I work with many immigrants, and as such, there’s always the topic of going abck to see friends and family. The lucky Europeans do it multiple times a year, while the rest of us try to go back home at least once. We talk about how’s home, what we do when we’re there and if we’ll ever want to move back. It is quite surprising how similar it is for most of us.

Trying interesting food & travelling

Oh, the cliche. Like almost every other person, we are super into trying tasty food and travelling. We talk about new restaurants to try, and new places to explore. In fact, we take it very seriously, especially the lunch part. We bike to places around us and then join other groups from the office to try out new places. Honestly, I look forward to my lunch everyday at work.

In closing

Of course this article is written for fun. I know how stressful job hunting can be, and sometimes it is good to read the trends in web development to check if you’re going going completely tangent. As you can tell from this article, trends can mean different things for different people. For job seekers, it could be the stuff to learn to become more relevant, while for companies, it could be sticking to tools and technologies that make finding talent easier. For a developer in their day to day life, it could be, as you just read, something totally different. I hope it was fun reading this one. Until the next one then!

Thank you for reading!

We entered a new year couple of weeks ago. I was a bit occupied with stuff around the new year’s time, but finally I can sit down and reflect upon how the last year went by for me. I’ll try to follow the same format as last year by writing what was good, what wasn’t, and my hopes for 2020. You can also check out 2019’s year review article.

In short

The start of this year was very busy given that I would be in India only for a week before setting out for Germany. There were a lot of feelings within me, all mixed together like the flavours in Bhel Puri. It wasn’t super comfortable knowing that I’m moving away from the comforts of home in a totally foreign country where I knew no one, and didn’t speak the language. Integrating in Germany was actually easier than what I had expected, and I think I was super lucky to find a good set of people around me. There was a lot of moving around in the city, travelling within Europe, meeting new people and making friends, trying all sorts of food and much more.

2019 was a busy year, but a very positive one in that. It was the year when I could understand a bit more about the kind of person I was, and the kind of people I like having around. I am genuinely thankful to all the people who touched my life this year. Following are a few highlights from the past year and TODOs for this one.

Highlights

• No sick days, at work or otherwise.
• Lost weight and got back into good health, started doing sports again and rode bike regularly.
• Started learning German. Did A1, and that really changed my experience in Germany.
• Did well socially, made sure I have no regrets when I think back about my start in this new world.
• Got super comfortable with what I do professionally and got some clarity on the kind of professional expertise I’d like to develop in the long run.
• Played board games, card games, chess, did karaoke, went to the lakes, biked 58kms in a day, lost my flight and luggage on the way to Berlin and many such memorable events.
• Travelled solo to a number of neighboring cities and countries.
• Realized my dream of turning a flat into my home with a lot of interesting customizations; warm and cozy with fairy lights, a good place to work, listen to music, read etc.
• Became much more confident about the kind of person I am, and gained insights about how I react in certain situations, especially adverse ones.
• Exchanged gifts with many people–friends and strangers–throughout the year. Learned the joys of giving.

#TODO in 2020

• Try and eat healthier food, cook often. Prepare lunch for office?
• Money management: Keep an eye on spending habits.
• Make faster progress with learning the German language.
• Read more.
• Lower the time spent on social media / reddit / youtube.
• Talk to even more people from around the world, get better socially and be a pleasant person.
• Help, teach and mentor people. Share whatever knowledge and experience I have more actively.
• Travel more than just superficially, explore by means other than air, go hiking.
• Get a license, go driving on the autobahn and Nurburgring. Bonus +50XP Drive a BMW.

Other Random Thoughts

Since everyone is talking about us moving into a new decade, here are a few of my thoughts and reflections. 10 years ago I was in my 10th grade, preparing for that big SSC exam every adult had scared us students about. That was the last thing we had to work hard for before we soar high in the comforts of adulthood, we were told.

Alas, like many things we’re told as kids, that wasn’t true. What was true, however, was that I stopped taking academics seriously from that point on. I remember learning how to ‘hack’ into Windows registry and change random config options to impress my friends in our computers lab. The list of embarrassing stuff I did back in the day is longer than I’m willing to admit publicly.

Interestingly, 10 years ago at this stage I still wanted to pursue science and not computers as a career. Computers were kind of new, science was the long term interest. Fascinating how things turned out, and how they could have if I had gone along the other path. Could be an article for another day. This is it for now.

Thank you for reading!