Year in a Review - 2020
The end of the most different year in all our lives is here. I thought it's a good time to look back at the year and see how my life has been!
January
I (along with my friends) organized a nationwide hackathon - HackVerse of a scale none of us had done before. It was really amazing and I personally learned so much about communities and picked up quite some non-technical skills.
February, March (before lockdown)
I went on 4 trips in this period to Kudlu Falls x 2, Sakleshpur, Kalasa -- with some close friends, student clubs I was part of and one road trip. It probably isn't much for university students who go on trips every other weekend, but for me these was the most amount of trips (previously I had been to only 3 trips) I went in my whole university life. I had some of the best and wildest experiences with these trips.
I also played basketball for the last time in the year without knowing for my department at college.
March (post lockdown), April, May, June, July
All these months run together in the memory.
Since the whole country went on lockdown and had the last few months left of my graduation to be completed, was mostly involved in completing academic projects, giving last exams (online), and the bachelor thesis project. I also got relieved of the commitments I had with student communities at college.
I (along with my GSoC '19 mentors) mentored a student for the Google Summer of Code program on App Store improvements project. The experience was nice and got to be on the other side of the table. I also migrated my site from Jekyll to Gatsby and picked up some skills.
I (along with my team-mates) spent quite some time on the bachelor thesis project which wasn't exactly going well, but am happy with the hard work we put in the lockdown and the end result. We published our work in NFV-SDN 2020 conference, and is available to read here. A huge thanks to the team-mates, mentor and our major project guide for all the support and push.
I also started watching some web series, movies -- I must say, time really flies by watching them, and are probably not worth the time. I also spent time reading some books. I joined Twitter back and am loving some of the tweets from developers.
Oh yes, and I graduated! 🎓
August, September, October, November, December
I started a job at Cisco as a software engineer in the IoT group on the Edge Intelligence project on August 5. The amount of things I've learned, hitting up with impostor syndrome, working in a corporate environment, connecting with people virtually, and not at all in real life has been totally different and am still coping up with a lot of things. More about it soon.
I also traveled back to my college for the last time amidst COVID to get all the leftover luggage from the hostel room back.
While all this happened, I got to stay with my parents for such a long time, and I'm really happy about that.
Final Thoughts and into 2021
A lot happened in 2020, and all of us are hopeful for 2021. I'm really looking forward to seeing friends in person again, and experiencing new things. Here are some of the things I personally want to do:
- My physical activities since COVID hit have come down to ZERO, and I want to spend some time in exercising or some physical activity.
- Blog more, I have a lot of backlog of posts on my list. I also started a newsletter in the hope of writing more posts and sharing.
There's still a lot more, let's see how it all goes. Wishing everyone good luck and best wishes for all you've planned for 2021. Onward.