Hello everyone, Sumit here from the Himalayas. I have been on a career break since November 2022. I was working with Hearth Display as their software engineering lead before they cancelled the contract. I needed lots of personal time and it was not working out well with them. I really enjoyed doing nothing much for the next many months.
I had shifted to a village in Sikkim, India during the pandemic and I have been enjoying the simple and slow life since then. From November 2022 to January 2023 I had a trip booked to Hamburg, Germany and I had a nice time with friends. I got a lot of time after that (when I came back) to focus on my hostel/co-living space (which is also my home).
After a few months I started to learn Rust again. I have been at it for some time now but was not able to work consistently enough to feel productive. I built a Git repository based learning product, which gave me a lot of practice in Rust. Then I tried a couple things and finally felt productive enough.
Since the end of 2023, I started working on an old product idea of mine, Dwata. It is a data exploration product without any technical knowledge (like SQL). I re-imagined the product with an AI based chat oriented UI this time where a user could start chat threads with any AI model and ask typical business or personal productivity questions.
The user would be able to add context from existing data sources, like databases to Stripe, Shopify type APIs, Dropbox, Google Drive type sources, CSV files or even their email inbox. I will go into product details in a later post. The main point I want to share is that it took me some time to build my personal routine, which I feel is very critical while I am a solo founder.
I mix my daily work with chores for the hostel. I have a few puppies (street dogs) which I take care of. And I have two cats. Chores for the hostel include some kitchen or toilet cleaning, basic maintenance. This naturally allows me a pomodoro technique since I need to get up from desk multiple times for all the work I mentioned.
I really enjoy software engineering and even though I am very well aware that most jobs in this field will be gone in the next few years, I write software because it is my personal space. It is part of my habit. I wanted to build a financially sustainable product instead of getting a job and have a few months of living money in the bank. I hope Dwata gets to some revenue before that. My living costs are very low here and that is a huge plus for me. Anyway, I wanted to share this as a personal note for myself and anyone else who may be on a similar boat. Thanks for reading, Cheers!
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