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2019: A year in review

2019 was a roller coaster ride. Every year is, but this year was even more so. Both personally and professionally, I tried a lot of things to make my life better. Some worked out, some didn’t work out as much as I expected. Here are some highlights:

Working remotely

If there was a single thing that had a huge impact on my life, it was working remotely. I could work in silence, from home without the hassle of commute, noise. I was able to get a lot of work done, finish up tasks with tight deadlines, interact with friends nearby in the evening and also play a lot of games.

Most companies don’t allow employees to work remotely(though that’s changing) citing that communication is the main problem from what I have read. I was one of the few people working remotely in my team and communication has never been a problem. Our workplace uses slack to share tasks/context and when that isn’t enough, we get on a call to discuss more. Perhaps, on-boarding is a problem.

I had previously tried working remotely in 2018, but that didn’t go well. I did a lot of mistakes like not setting up a workspace where there are no distractions. This time I was careful not to repeat the same mistake. Next to that is going out of the house every other day and interacting with people - friends etc. If you get get a chance to work from home, do try it.

Sadly, the startup I was working for - Duta folded and I am back to working from an office for now.

Side projects and Open source

Working on side projects gives an opportunity to build things from scratch: from ideation, design, implementation and also do things your way. I love Rust, but there is little opportunity to use Rust in a workplace setting. So, I use Rust for all my side-projects. This year I have released two libraries in Rust - dex and ghetto-lock. They are both open-source. Please try them out if you get a chance.

I also took part in Hacktoberfest for the second time. It’s awesome. I have been postponing my work on dex but Hacktoberfest gave me enough proof that there is a lot of time left to work on side projects. Context switches are the biggest problem when working on multiple projects at once. What has worked for me is to do a good chunk of work on weekends where I can spend more time and spend the rest of the week days writing tests, identifying, debugging and fixing issues in the code I have worked on during the weekend. That way, I am constantly in sync with the code every day to some extent. I plan to continue the streak and do more next year!

Free time

What to do in free time has always been a puzzle for me. So, either I just kept working on weekends or used to binge watch videos on youtube. There is a lot of fuss about traveling in software circles, so I decided to give it a try. I went to a couple of places with friends/family. It’s a good way to kill some time and get away from every day routine. I want to travel more but sadly everybody is busy all the time.

What hasn’t worked

I have been ignoring health since a long time and this year was no different. I tried multiple things - going to the gym, maintaining sleep cycles, try to eat healthy food etc. but nothing has worked for me in the long term. I was soon back to my old habits. I don’t understand why it’s not working out to fix it.

I wanted to explore Machine Learning/Data science but it didn’t work out because of job change etc.

What’s in 2020?

After Duta folded, I joined Mad Street Den(MSD) after evaluating a range of options. There’s a huge culture shift compared to Duta and it’s not exactly what I expected but it’s too early to judge. I have to see how this works out.

Happy new year!

#2019 #Goals