DEV Community: Mukesh

Day 5 of My 180-Day Developer Challenge: Asking "Why?" Makes Every New Skill Easier to Learn

Mukesh — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:41:22 +0000

My Secret to Tackling Tough Topics: Always Start With "Why?". Whenever I learn something new, I first look at why it was needed in the first place. If you ever encounter something difficult or complex. Just research why it was created and adopted in the first place. After that, It would be much easier to learn something.

For example, You might want to know about cloud computing. Why was cloud computing was adopted? To make hosting easier and quicker - you could get any kind of machine you want. It could be a fserver, database, CDN, cache or backup. If you learn from that perspective, You instantly know why this service exists in the first place: why SSH key pair, why expose an IP address, why choose an OS or region. There could be a better example, But you get how easy it is to learn with that approach.

I started learning from this perspective to give myself a creative approach to technology or service. I would rather explore 10 different things about a new service rather than stress about it. It really makes sense when you realize that this technology is meant to make things easier for you to use. It could be simple, yet a lot of people just learn for the sake of learning or putting a new fancy thing on resume. Now i will explain, How i learned CI with some past history, theory and by taking action.

I want to share how people were dealing with a lot of pain integrating code, so you'll also understand why people adopted CI in the first place.

Scenario: Imagine you are a maintainer of a project on GitHub (or any other platform). Someone just made a pull request (~300 lines of code). There are some ground rules you've set as a maintainer - there should be 2-space indentation, some extra linting rules, and a few design patterns you've chosen. But to approve that piece of code, here's what you need to doe.

Clone the branch of the pull request.
Install all the dependencies.
Check for spacing, naming conventions and other linting rules.
Verifying every public function has a docstring or comment. Run each test and more…..

There are more problems that i didn't even mention like at least a week of wait for merging (It takes time for manual check), sudden outbreaks in production, or bugs popping out of nowhere and you're the one being blamed for it. It's a nightmare for a large team and a big codebase.

CI (Continuous Integration) came into the picture as a solution. There are many tools you can try, like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, etc. For familiarity, I'll go with GitHub Actions. GitHub gives you about 2000 free GitHub Actions minutes per month. It could be more or less, comment down if it's different.

To make automated tests, you would need a machine - Github would run a virtual machine just for the tests on a single pull request. It's a virtual machine with the operating system of your choice ( usually Ubuntu is prefered ). The repo gets cloned and dependencies would be installed with 4–5 lines of code. Then your actual tests run - Linting, Security checks, Unit tests, Integration tests, Cross-Platform Tests, etc. After that, you can just check whether the issue was resolved by that code. Then the job is done. Maintaining a project is still a lot of work as a maintainer, but CI makes the job much easier with automation.To create a CI tests in your repo. These are the steps:

Create a .github/workflows directory.
Create CI.yaml or CI.yml file ( either works, but yml is prefered)
Write your own file or copy this for a skeleton code and Commit the file

name: ci

on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  tests:
    name: Tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Check out code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Set up Node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 18

      - name: Check node version
        run: node --version

Comment down your thoughts and if you found this helpful, Feel free to follow!!

Day 4 of My 180-Day Developer Challenge: The Day Recursion Clicked

Mukesh — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 13:14:49 +0000

Many of us went through the same pain as I did — Recursion. When I started learning DSA concepts and solving Leetcode problems, I first encountered recursion. My reaction was, “How do these 3–4 lines even work?”. I searched for tutorials and tried to understand them. But I could just take the code, run it, accept it and never touched it again for a long time. I solved problems for so long and still I was not able to grasp after it even after 3–4 months of DSA. When it came to trees, it even got worse for me. DFS on a matrix for me was like magic. Throw some if statements and call the function again inside the same function itself.

Then all of a sudden, One day I could finally understand the visualization. Whenever I want to solve a problem. I need that visualization of solution. But recursion never gave me that clarity. Some said think it as a stack of operations one after the other. What hit me was when I did postorder, preorder traversal on binary tree. I could see that it hits the last leaf with no nodes and then pushes it. I could see the base condition and then calling the function to get the leaf node and push it. This was the situation 6 months ago.

Now, I can totally rock it. I solve medium problems of recursion on trees, graphs or matrix within 10–15mins. Today I was on a spree for medium recursion problems. I solved 5 problems in under an hour.I was recalling the moment when i called it magic. Yeah, It was funny to think how struggles are pain in the moment but looking back at them felt trivial or not needed. This hit me when i was solving 814. Binary Tree Pruning. This was the solution for the problem.

class Solution {
public:
    TreeNode* pruneTree(TreeNode* root) {
        modifyTree(root);
        return root;
    }
private:
    void modifyTree(TreeNode*& node) {
        if (node == nullptr) return;
        if (node->right != nullptr) modifyTree(node->right);
        if (node->left != nullptr) modifyTree(node->left);

        if (node->val == 0 && node->right == nullptr && node->left == nullptr) node = nullptr;
    }
};

Get the last leaf of the tree and then check whether its value is 0 and has no left or right child nodes. Then point it to nullptr. Then the same check happens for the parent nodes, as the recursion completes from the bottom up…

You could be one of the people who is stuck in these kind of problems. Maybe it‘s Sliding window, Two pointers, DP or even the classic Two sum problem. Remember just try to hit it again tomorrow and keep doing it. It will be difficult at first to manage the feeling of being dumb. That’s how it should be. When you workout, you feel weak afterward but later the next day you become stronger. It’s the same case with learning. It applies to any kind of subject you are learning whether it’s DSA, Web development, App development or System design.

Progress is not always linear; It goes up and down. Sometimes it feels like the chart has crashed. But the effort you put in never goes in vain. Just hit it consistently. Comment down your thoughts and if you found something useful, Feel free to follow!

Day 3 of My 180-Day Developer Challenge: How I Escaped Tutorial Hell as a Developer

Mukesh — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 10:21:30 +0000

The most common trap that new developers face. It’s the tutorial hell. I had my own version of tutorial hell and yours could be a bit different. My version of tutorial hell looked something like learning everything from scratch again and again, thinking i would gain something new. Watching Html, Css and Js tutorials from different creators for the sake of feeling productive. But there was no one to guide me any other topics. When faced real challenges, i couldn’t be confident to solve them like creating systems, how to make reusable code or applying some patterns in code (I didn’t even there was something like patterns in code). But I could confidently say that it was an important phase for me. Sometimes just blindly learning gets you no where. It is important to look for results. You would usually hear advice like focus on learning and consistency will get you results or don’t go for quick reward and focus on long term gain. But Sometimes you need to snap out of that loop, could you produce something real with your learning? Could you make a change in the real world? Is your invention capable of bringing an impact in the real world or you didn’t even create something that could.

What i did was to learn broadly instead of deeply and you should too at the start of your journey.

I explored Data science and learned why Python is used for it and there was more tools out there.
I explored Game development and learned game engines like Unity, learned C# and there are too many things you could do in game development like music, song, game design, gamification, character design and more endless things.
I explored low level systems and backend systems.
I explored system design and DSA ( they are not just interview purposes but play a important role in a lot of systems we at daily basis ).
I explored App development on desktop as well as mobile, learned about Electron for desktop and react native for mobile app.
I explored DevOps and how they host and manage with automation.
I learned about patterns like singleton pattern, strategy pattern, factory pattern and different ways to design code.
I learned about Agile, scrum methodologies and how they were different from waterfall methodology.

In future i could explore AI, Web3, digital mining and more. People may say that market value those who have expertise but when you are starting your journey, How could you find something that is worth becoming expert in and with AI becoming good at its job, I could say the people who adapt to the situation are a great deal. My opinion on AI would be that it has done a good work in taking down the simple work and it would just accelerate the human progress to next level on its stage.

What could you do if you want to get better at your work and make an impact to the world.

Explore broad areas instead of narrowing down and narrow down once you know it’s the right one.
Get someone to guide you on this journey or hire someone (If you could).
Try to make an impact with your projects.
Don’t learn everything like a function name and syntax. Technology keeps evolving and it will. Learn the concepts and apply them.
Join any developer community and network with people who are into the same thing.

I think it’s an important phase, either you give up (which most of the times happen) or people never repeat the same mistakes again which makes them great developers in the journey. I have my own experience and it could be the most unique and your journey could be the most unique too. So find your way out, What works for you and apply it. Comment down your thought and if you found something useful, Feel free to follow!!

Day 2 of My 180-Day Developer Challenge: Building Git, learning about Docker and Go

Mukesh — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 15:34:10 +0000

I came to know about an interesting fact today, Git was created in 5 days!!! I was in awe by this fact that a single person created it in 5 days. The man was none other than the creator of Linux operating system — Linus Torvalds. I was inspired in that moment — It became clear to me that a single person could spark a revolution that changes the world. If I would create a lifetime goal, it would definitely become as good as this man. Git might be just around 1000 lines but it is still a great tool.

Today i created the Git hash-object CLI command. If you want to know what i did before this checkout my previous blog — https://medium.com/@mukeshchoudhary33333/day-1-of-my-180-day-developer-challenge-rebuilding-git-from-scratch-be30274e37ac . I have replicated the command. At first, It took time for me to understand the libraries like crypto, zlib and fs. These are built-in libraries in NodeJs. I was mostly stuck at creating a hash on the content blob \0 . Other than that, everything was fine. I mostly searched the documents for synchronous functions in fs and zlib like deflateSync, writeFileSync, mkdirSync etc. Explored https://wyag.thb.lt/ (write your own git ), good documentation. It used Python for code examples, it was simple and easy to understand. I will try to create tree objects and read tree commands tomorrow.

The main thing i learned was theory of Docker. I have used it before, but never went a level lower or deeper in it. Docker is used for containerization, It solves the problem of “Working on my system but not on other systems”. Docker came into the picture and solved this problem. It would also be useful if I am on new laptop or pc and i don’t have any libraries or package manager installed. In that case, i could just pull an image from docker hub. Start the container from the image and it is ready to use.

On a lower level, it uses three main functionalities — Docker engine, Docker CLI, Docker registry. If anyone wants to master Docker, these are the areas where they could start and build their expertise. Docker CLI is a way to communicate to Docker engine, Which creates containers and manages them. Docker registry is like npm where we could publish our images and pull images. It could also be compared to Github in a sense.

Then i explored the Go language, It is a language I have heard a lot about. I had some curiosity about it. This language is extremely fast. It was memory light, fast, compiles at a good speed too, has a garbage collector on top of that. The syntax was pretty neat. It’s was faster than Javascript and Python. Though C, Rust and Zig are still faster than Go. But simplicity and performance in one package. Then I understood why it was so popular among developers. I will use this for my projects. I am thinking of HTTP servers and redis in this language after i have known it well enough. Comment down your thoughts. Feel free to follow if you found it useful.

Day 1 of My 180-Day Developer Challenge: Rebuilding Git from Scratch

Mukesh — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 15:59:35 +0000

Starting my journey of building projects and learning a lot of important topics, grinding DSA on LeetCode and learning system design topics. I have started with building git from scratch. One of the most used tools in the developer community: Git, a distributed version control system. Git is used by many popular companies like Github, Gitlab etc… Why do developers use it? Because it solves a major problem of contributing code by different people to a single repo. Without Git, we would probably share code with each other and manage tasks or use real-time connection to a main server, which is a lot of pain. It is the core of open source contribution. So now you can see how important this system is.

But I wondered what project would be tough enough for me to learn and also help me understand one of the tools I use. So the obvious one: Git. So I will share my part of how I encountered problems and solved them.

To make it easy, I have searched for some structured learning to start and then I came across code-crafters. It was structured and made me search for topics while also explaining the low level stuff. You could also learn from it. I will make some decent projects in the first 30 days from this platform. You could too, https://app.codecrafters.io/r/graceful-worm-869324 . Use this link and get 1 week of premium and access to all the steps of any low level projects like git, redis, Interpreter, kafka, and many more.

So the first experience was to choose a language, I chose to go for JavaScript. I would have chosen C++ for any low level projects but i need some refresher. I chose simplicity over complexity because it’s a personal project. If it was a project someone or I would use then, C++ would be way better. Got a repo link, cloned the repo and it started with uncommenting some basic code for cli. I have looked at that code for 30 minutes and searched for every part like fs, zlib, and command process. Later understood that it was git init command which created directories for it.

Git under the hood uses three directories — HEAD, objects, refs. HEAD contains the reference to the current branch you are working on. Objects would store data and refs stores pointers to commits for branches and tags. I learned about objects in detail today. It is used as the core database. It uses SHA-1 (Not sure, could also be SHA-256 in newer versions) for storing files and the contents in it. SHA-1 is 40 characters, first two characters are for folder name and the other part for the file inside that folder. Git stores them as blob \0 .

So the second step was to create git cat-file cmd. It reads the content of the file in string format. I added the command and some extra arguments for flag and hash.

const command = process.argv[2];
const flag = process.argv[3];
const hash = process.argv[4];

switch (command) {
  case "init":
    createGitDirectory();
    break;
  case "cat-file": // step 2

    if (flag == "-p" && hash) {
   readBlob(hash);
  } else{
   console.error("Usage: node app/main.js cat-file -p <hash>");
  }
    break;
  default:
    throw new Error(`Unknown command ${command}`);
}

It was a simple task, the real challenge was to understand the internals and the functions within fs, zlib and what data would stored in that object. I have coded this part for an hour nearly. Searched documentation, asked AI (i have used AI to understand topics, not to spit all the work for me), experimented with the output I got. Then I understood that it was giving me back Buffer instead of string when I checked the logs. Then I converted that to string and gave only the content of the data to print.

function readBlob(hash) {
 const dir = hash.slice(0,2);
 const file = hash.slice(2);
 const objectPath = path.join(process.cwd(), ".git", "objects", dir, file);

 if (!fs.existsSync(objectPath)) {
    console.error("Object not found at path:", objectPath);
    process.exit(1);
  }

 const compressedData = fs.readFileSync(objectPath);
 const data = zlib.inflateSync(compressedData).toString();

 const idx = data.indexOf('\x00');
  process.stdout.write(data.substring(idx + 1));
}

Learned a lot, felt proud of myself for a moment and moved on. It was the real growth, I have completed all of this in 2 hours. Then solved DSA and learned about Docker. The best insight for the day would be how CLI ( command line interface ) works under the hood. If this helped you in any way, feel free to follow!

Day 0: The 180-Day Challenge That Will Transform Me Into a Better Developer

Mukesh — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 14:17:53 +0000

Every developer, at some point in their career, wants to become a better developer. So, to become a better developer — i have to choose the uncomfortable path of pushing myself to the edge consistently. What better way to start this journey by posting the journey online. When i commit to this journey, there would be accountability and pressure to show myself everyday.

I am familiar enough with developing projects to call myself a junior developer. I do not have any real job experience too. In this era of AI and junior developers are getting replaced left and right. I guess i need the skill level of a senior level developer. It’s been 2 years since i started this journey. I know basic DSA ( 200+ problems mostly easy), some system design, basic DevOps, web dev and my fundamentals are clear. I had my shares of tutorial hell and getting out of it by applying what i learned. So my goal would be to learn for 4 hours and if possible 10 hours ( if i am motivated ). Nothing beats consistency though.

I am starting this journey to become a better version of myself who could maintain a level of consistency, avoid distractions and maintain an emotional control over desires. My monetary goal would be to land a job but why this challenge, you may ask, when there are 1000+ AI applications stacked against me. I don’t think i have any advantage or even a way to showcase my skills.

I will do all of these tasks every day to get better.

Creating projects which are tough enough to push me
Learning about system design which scales large applications
DSA ( It’s a proof of work to companies that i worked hard and understand complexity of code. A basic handshake for them)
DevOps ( I was always curious about hosting and deploying, so win-win)
Open source ( Later in my journey after i learned enough )
Blogging ( For accountability reasons ) I have tried to contribute to open source, but if i at least learn about different components of a project like DevOps, core logic, testing, integrating parts, large system design for scale. Then i could make an impact and bring value. Open source is on my list for not some fancy remote jobs but actually learning how large companies handle code. Do not think open source could land any one a fancy, high paying job. Interacting with people and solving issues together is what open source is. Real value would be the network of people, I would say.

Any suggestions or criticism would be helpful. Here is my day — 0 of this journey. No fancy mondays or 1st of any month or year. Because “THERE IS NO TOMORROW” ( i am not dying, just a quote ). I am recording this journey and i will post what I have learned every day. Follow me if you are curious what would be at the end of the journey. I’m about to find out. You could too.