Initial Commit

Hey! I’m Nishanth Vijayan.

Some of you may already know me from work, travel or twitter. But for those who do not:

I’m a Lead Software Engineer building backend services at Headout - a travel experience marketplace.

I have the luxury of a remote job, of which I take full advantage. I travel around and work out of different parts of India (& occasionally outside India too). More on this later.

I’ve been meaning to start writing for a long time, but like most of my plans in life, it never materialised - until now!

Why now?

Honestly I don’t have a good answer. I’m on a tiny break from work (5 days), and I’m in a village called Ghandruk in Nepal with not much to do. So I figured now is as good as a time as any to get started.

What will I be writing about?

Well, I don’t know. Yet. (TBH “I don’t know yet” is a huge part of my life).

I’m a big “let the chips fall where they may” kinda guy. So we’ll see where this journey takes us. I may write about my travel experiences, thoughts about culture, anything interesting that I find on the internet etc.

I most definitely won’t be writing about implementation-level tech stuff. So rest assured, don’t expect “How to do X using AWS Lambda & Cogito” type of posts here.

Why am I doing this?

A mishmash of different motivations.

Capturing Travel memories

In the last 2-3 years of my backpacking journey, I’ve encountered many interesting people and heard many interesting stories, but I have never really jotted them down succinctly or consistently. This blog is an attempt to be more diligent in capturing my experiences.

Clarity of thought & Self Expression

There are always multiple questions, confusions, and conundrums that I’m grappling with in my personal & professional life. Perhaps forcing myself to write them down in a structured fashion will help me make sense of my own thoughts.

Creating Luck

There’s enough written about this topic by much better writers so I won’t go into details. Essentially, putting your ideas & thoughts in public can increase your surface area of luck. Read How to Create Luck by swyx.

Try new things

As someone who struggles heavily with the fear of failure, trying something new has always been a pain.

But sometime in the last 2-3 years, I convinced myself that I am someone who is 'open to trying new things’. Writing this post is an exercise in that self-belief.

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Well that’s it for today. Until next time.