The Weight of More

How often do you look back on what you have been doing and feel, damn, I have done so much, but at the same time, feel like none of it is enough?

Not because you are ungrateful.

Not because you do not see the progress.

But because every time you reach something you once wanted, another mountain quietly appears in front of you.

Chapter 1: First Year of Undergrad

It was early 2024. I was in my first semester of college, just starting out, new to tech. I wanted to learn a few things, but I had not decided what I was going to pursue in tech.

Was it going to be frontend? Backend? DevOps? I did not quite understand what DevOps truly meant until much later.

My college had a Software Club, the kind everyone wanted to get into.

I remember getting interviewed to possibly get mentorship from the seniors who were part of the Software Club. One question they asked me is still stuck with me.

If you are confused about something, where do you look for guidance? Do you read documentation? If yes, where?

Well, I could not give an answer to it. I truly did not understand what documentation meant and had never really read one until then.

As you might have guessed, I did not get the mentorship. I was sad, but not shocked. That was expected, haha.

Chapter 2: DeerHack

One year passed since the interview. Not much had changed in terms of my technical abilities. I was now in my second year of college. I had learned frontend development and was still wandering around, trying to figure out what I should do.

A year later, my longtime friend Dipan Silwal became president of the Software Club and picked me as vice president. At that time, I felt undeserving as the vice president of a club, because I barely knew tech.

One of our main tasks was to organize the annual hackathon event, DeerHack.

Through ups and downs, we successfully conducted the event. But after that event, one thing in me had changed.

I had helped organize an event full of brilliant people, with some of Nepal’s best tech folks mentoring and judging. But alongside the joy of finishing it, I felt a void.

I realized I could barely keep a conversation going about tech. I could not understand things that my peers could. I realized that I was way behind, and I needed to pursue something deeper. I needed to hone my skills.

Chapter 3: The Weight of More

Mid 2025, after DeerHack ended, I was fortunate enough to get some mentorship from Utsab Sapkota, my cousin, who gave me a roadmap to learn through DevOps.

I was studying networking and all the things that had once looked boring to me. I made my own Kubernetes homelab and was learning through the basics.

By the end of December, I had been learning networking, Linux systems, and a bit of DevOps tooling for the last 3 months, though I was still highly inconsistent at that time.

I wanted to contribute to open source. I tried navigating through a few projects, maybe Cilium and some others that I do not quite remember.

A day earlier, I had created an X account. I stumbled upon a post that had a link to a repo with a collection of free certifications. Interested, I went into the DevOps section and saw CMC, Certified Meshery Contributor.

I had seen Meshery’s name a few times when I checked the LFX mentorship page, so I was interested.

I honestly thought to myself, let me navigate through this, and maybe I will land my first PR in open source.

That is how my journey with Meshery started. I joined the community hoping to get my first PR merged.

I stuck with Meshery. I was contributing and presenting my work. I was working on creating tests for mesheryctl. I was doing the work, presenting my work week in and week out, when in the beginning, I could barely understand what a BATs test meant.

I then got pushed to sync the reports from the tests to qa.meshery.io. Not knowing how it was done, not knowing what Allure meant or did, I still said I would do it.

And I did it.

Days went by, and it was late February. I had been in Meshery for about 3 months now, contributing almost every day or every other day. I had applied for LFX, hoping and praying that I would get it.

But the plan was simple. Even if I did not get the mentorship, I would still apply for another term or GSoC. Leaving the project was never the plan for me.

In March, the good news arrived. I got selected for LFX. I had achieved the goals I had set for myself.

i) Get a PR merged
ii) Get LFX mentorship

I started to work on the core ideas of the project. I started learning and re-learning about relationships in Meshery, which is a really interesting bit. I might write another blog on this.

I started reviewing PRs for mesheryctl, and similarly, I started working around OpenAPI documents.

I had no idea that they existed before. The word schemas was just related to database to me.

During my mentorship, I worked on various things, but schemas scared the living shit out of me. It is just a document, a spec, but getting to the point where you truly understand it is another task.

I worked on creating an audit tool that checks the overall health of the projects and outputs to the terminal and a Google Sheet, showing how each endpoint is doing across different metrics. The end goal is to get Meshery schema-driven.

Even after doing so many different things, I still feel a void in me, a need to do more. The same feeling I once had after DeerHack is back, but this time it feels heavier.

Back then, the weight came from knowing that I was behind.

Now, the weight comes from knowing that I have moved forward, and still, it does not feel enough.

The version of me who could not answer what documentation meant is now reading specs, reviewing PRs, building tools, and trying to understand how real systems work.

And still, it feels like I have only scratched the surface.

That is the strange part about wanting more. It does not always feel inspiring. Sometimes it feels like carrying something on your chest. You are proud, but restless. Grateful, but unsatisfied. Tired, but unable to stop.

The journey has only begun.

And maybe the weight of more is not something I need to get rid of.

Maybe it is something that keeps me moving.