What I Enjoy Nowadays!

Things have changed a lot since last September. I had an emotional breakdown, partially recovered after a while, and then hit another low point between December and January. It was pretty harsh on my mental health. Though things eventually started falling into place, I lost interest in the activities that used to bring me satisfaction and joy. Previously, those were:

• Gaming: I used to play with my flatmates, mainly Roy and Gowtham. First, Gowtham left for Bangalore, then Roy also moved out of the flat, so I eventually uninstalled the game.
• Cooking: Before September, it was a fun activity. Afterward, it felt like a chore I wanted to avoid. Whatever I cooked, whether it turned out good or bad tasted completely bland to me.
• Reading & Writing: I used to read technical books and blogs and write my own posts. I stopped reading entirely and started constantly overthinking instead.
• Trading: I stepped away from the markets due to my mental health issues & fear of financial loss.
• Socializing: Talking to people outside my immediate circle felt like a chore. Conversations didn’t feel natural. Even to this day, I feel like I don’t have much to talk about.
• Tinkering: I stopped fiddling around with my laptop entirely, and it just collected dust for weeks.

Everything I mentioned above used to be a much more social experience; I was surrounded by people most of the time, whether it was my flatmates, office colleagues, or random strangers on the buses and roads of Kochi.

Now, things have changed. It has been close to three months since I moved back to Delhi, due to WFH. As soon as I returned, I started traveling short distances, visited my sister’s place, and met up with my best friend from school, Sahil. I also started going out for my usual night walks.

Over the past two months, I have taken up home workouts and started using whey protein. A few weeks ago, I also introduced early morning walks into my routine covering about 7KMs in 1.5 hours. My average daily step count has increased to over 12k, up from a maximum of 7k–8k previously. Thanks to this new daily routine, my body is finally getting back into shape.

I have also started regaining my interests. Lately, I’ve been fiddling around with an open-source Android music player app named vanilla music player .

As a huge audiophile, I’ve spent countless hours on it just listening to music and curating playlists. Even though I’ve been coding for quite a few years, I had never actually touched an Android app before. Recently, I set up Android Studio on my laptop, forked code of Vanilla Music, and set up Gemini.

I prompted the AI with my feature request: adding a “dequeue” option to the rest menu for each item in the queue. As it turned out, it only required a 3 to 4 line change. Honestly, I was surprised. It felt kind of magical to me.

I spent the last two weekends working on the same project to add music visualizations. I’ve been a massive fan of visualizers since the Windows Media Player and Winamp eras, yet it’s a feature missing from most modern Android music players. With the help of Gemini and an open-source visualization library, I managed to implement it.

I wanted this feature in Vanilla Music so badly, but I never thought I’d be the one implementing it myself While also learning Java and bits of Kotlin along the way.

You can check the project here: https://github.com/T4P4N/vanilla-music-extended

It feels incredibly refreshing. I feel confident enough to build just about anything now, whereas previously, I tend to avoid Android and iOS apps entirely. Now that I know the basics, I’m eager to build more Android apps.

Next up on my list are 3D games and game engines, which I might fiddle around with in the coming years… or perhaps after my next emotional breakdown.