I have been thinking about writing a year end review and here it goes. It’s just a log of the mistakes I have made and the decisions that I took based on them and you can have your own opinions

I was at home for the 2017 new year and though the weather in Chennai stabilized it was still comfortable being home for the new year. I had the usual flurry of messages and my hands full of grit about the things to achieve for the year. My friend came to drop me at my pick up point and we thought to take a selfie and I told him of the plans for the year. But I finally gave in saying if life was little less shitty compared to the previous year it’s progress. So I took a snap and posted it with the caption ‘Let shit go’ and there goes 2017.

Commute

I changed jobs last year and it introduced me to a new schedule of things a commute of 2-3 hours everyday. The primary reason being the fact that I got used to the comfort and generally aversive (lazy to be honest) towards moving to different places and getting used to the shops and food around there. So I made to promise to get to office early and then leave early in order to avoid the traffic. I used to take a 570 AC for commute and since my new office had 7 hour workday I left the office by 4.30-5 and then reach home by around 6.30 after dinner. Though this gave me the habit of leaving work at correct times it got me to a new frustration of commute. I still remember the day when I started from my office in the evening and my friend boarded train from Salem to reach Tirupur by the time I got home. You read it right and taking into account 2-3 hours of commute I was spending around 60 full hours in bus for a month. I resorted to books, music and even programming. But commute itself became a hell hole of it’s own leaving me fatigued in the evenings and the need to sleep early so that I can wake up early leaving almost nothing to do. Luckily one of my friends came in for an internship and I thought to move on thankfully given my lazy track record in finding a hostel nearby. The commute time reduced to 15-20 minutes and that itself was a great turnaround that I can still wake up late and then reach home by 6. Since I slept very late in the night it gave me 6 hours to do whatever I wanted to do and the frequency of the bus was also high. He finally finished his internship and I moved to a separate house. Almost all the time I had one my friends as a company and hence living alone is itself was a unique experience over the years and then I moved on to the next set of cooking madness.

Cooking

Me : Here is a photo of the Maggi I cooked

Mom : Well, why does it look like Upma ?

Well that summarises my cooking skills :) To be frank I never tried it since I always ate outside and had good access to food but it was always a time constraint one depending upon the shop timing and availability. So after a lot of insistence from my parents I finally plunged into cook something on my own. The difficult thing about cooking is mostly in moving out the utensils in case you are moving out to a different house. Sounds silly but I feel that way. I bought some utensils and then started out with some really simple dishes like Maggi, Upma and dosa. This year also had Milo back in production and the whole set give me some freedom to cook whenever I want. This also lead to eating very late night and then skipping breakfast on most days with milk. My mom was more than excited and had long calls over doing an Upma. My friend also moved in and a pretty great cook. I am learning it and it’s gives some more responsibility over survival on my own and I hope to improve being a stupid AI in cooking :)

Code

This year has been a pretty wild ride given the amount of fat finger incidents and things broken in general to learn from. This year was extremely good compared to my previous year that I finally completed some side projects I had started ;) I did some interesting prototypes with other languages and frameworks giving me good amount of paradigm shifts. I am confident the next year will be even more exciting with a lot of interesting experiments.

Blog

The blog was a great experiment and I am happy that I revived it and writing gives me more pleasure these days given that I wrote close to 23k words this year alone. Trying not to be a smug it also allows me to write something that I can go back and read to myself. I also experimented with poems and comics. Blog also provides me a medium to interact with the community and to contribute something back with tutorials and musing on the things I have been playing with. I have also increased the amount of blogs that I read this year with people sharing a lot about technical and non-technical parts. I hope to write/rant more for the next year.

Kindle

I started reading books during my commute but I was tired and couldn’t get hold of it. Later this year I bought a set of books to study but carrying them around and accessibility when I felt to give a read was limited. So I bought a Kindle during September on an impulsive note to be fair since I didn’t have a concrete reading habit established to utilize it well. I was advised by my friends to start from a genre to read what you love and then to move on to other genre of books once the habit is set. The trick worked fairly well and I started with Sidney Sheldon. I love it but it introduces another impulse of having a large set of books stocked in the Kindle only to not start them at all like the movies I have in my hard disk. The following are the books I have read for the year in no particular order :

  • Windmill of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon
  • If Tomorrow Comes by Sidney Sheldon
  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  • The Enchiridion by Epictetus
  • Nylon kayiru by Sujatha
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
  • Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Maybe

So it was a less shitty year in general compared to 2016 and there is a lot of scope for improvement and bugs/regressions to fix for the next year :) So hoping less stupidity and maybe a little more organized life next year. Speaking of organizing myself I just forgot the warm Milo I left on the mug for an hour. BRB.

Closes emacs with face-palm

P.S. : Thanks to everyone who had been a part of the year. Merry Christmas and wishing you a pretty rad 2018 :)