Blog
Field notes & reflections
I'm Aryan Sharma, an Agricultural Engineering Technology and Management (AETM) student at Purdue University. I write up the software and infrastructure I build, what breaks along the way, and the moments from campus, work, and travel that stay with me.
All posts
2026
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My 20th Birthday: The Best One Yet, Perhaps!
Midnight chocolates, a 12:30 A.M. email, two and a half hours of sleep, an oversold Delta flight to Austin, and a day that kept proving closed mouths don't get fed.
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One Week Before Finals: A Road Trip to Kings Island
A pre-finals road trip from Purdue to Kings Island: 400 miles, two rides, long lines, and a tired but memorable night in Cincinnati.
2025
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The Silent Power of Human Touch
A quiet evening by Purdue's Bell Tower turns into a reflection on distance, vulnerability, and the hugs we often skip.
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Ping-Ponging Traffic Between GitHub Pages and a Dorm-Room Server with Cloudflare Workers
A free, automatic failover between GitHub Pages and my dorm-room server, using a health ping and a Cloudflare Worker that preserves the path and query.
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Meal Plan Analysis at Purdue
A numbers-first breakdown of Purdue's 7, 10, and 14 meal plans for Fall 2025, with the real cost per meal and tips for getting the most out of swipes.
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My Lessons from Steve Jobs: Rethinking Time, Work, and Impact
What listening to Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech every night during my internship in Tanzania taught me about time, work, and staying hungry.
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Witnessing Inequality: Reflections from Tanzania
What I saw of wealth disparity, education, and healthcare while interning in Tanzania, read alongside Bill Gates' thoughts on inequity.
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VPNs and the 403 Forbidden Error
Why a running VPN can make localhost return 403 Forbidden, and the settings, bindings, and firewall rules that fix it.
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Lessons from XAMPP: Reliability Challenges
What building a PHP accounting and inventory system on XAMPP taught me about data corruption, recovering InnoDB files, and backups you can trust.
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Building the Footprints Page: A Technical Deep Dive
A deep dive into how I built the interactive 3D globe behind my Footprints page, kept image bandwidth low with Cloudinary, and added the IronGate defense layer.
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End-to-End SQL Backup, Compression, and Notification System
How I automated daily MySQL backups with native Windows scripts: compressed dumps, an rclone upload to Google Drive, and email alerts for every run.
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Written by Aryan Sharma
I study Agricultural Engineering Technology and Management (AETM), the Purdue major formerly called Agricultural Systems Management (ASM). I'm a research assistant on Purdue's IoT4Ag team, building tools that make agricultural sensor networks easier to deploy, and I run the self-hosted infrastructure behind this site.