I wrote a log last year and it felt good to write so here I am writing back about another year of good and bad stuff. I have divided the year into following subsections that can be skipped as necessary since this post got way more longer since it turned out to be one of my favourite years :) This might seem like a humble brag given the length but you know about my incessant overthinking and worried (polambal) nature ;)

  • Open source promotions
  • Read, write (and travel)?
  • Friends forking on
  • Health regressions
  • Ad-libbing adulthood

Open source promotions (skippable)

tldr - I was interested in open source but it’s hard to work on open source unless you have a substantial project. I found CPython to be mine this year and made good contributions :)

Oh boy, where do I begin! As I wrote code for food and fun I had a great year exploring various communities. My first minor but user facing contribution landed this year fixing an auto-completion bug for Leiningen for JDK 9 and above. Then I started doing a lot of Clojure that I wrote a post on fixing JDK 9 and Clojure 1.9 compatibilities. I also did a post on Rust about the top dependencies and got good feedback about it. So this completes the first half of 2018.

For a long time I wanted to know how it feels like contributing to a big project and preferably a language implementation. Unlike most years I thought to actually give it a try :) Rust came to my mind given the community but I don’t know Rust good enough and felt more home on Python, language I know more and use at work. Since CPython also moved to GitHub the friction for contribution seemed very less. So I made my first PR which was just fixing several typos I found by running aspell across the docs. It felt good and the process was very good with GitHub reducing the barrier compared to mercurial though I use mercurial at work.

I then moved on to easy issues and started subscribing to the tracker. For the first few months emails would flow and I had no sense over what I am reading. It all felt like alien language to move me. But I started picking up one bug at a time which is pure Python and then added test cases though I couldn’t fix them. In some cases while trying to write a test I was able to figure out what to do and started making a PR. So I started reading more and more issues. I added myself to interesting discussions to see how a feature is developed, the tradeoffs taken into consideration and so on. I started using search more and became more active in adding related issues and people to the issue. At one week I was skimming almost all the bugs in the last 5-10 years adding more context.

So on September 24 I got an email which I thought was a mail to have me blocked given my activity and turned out to be a promotion mail giving me triager privileges with relevant endorsement. Thanks a lot for the trust upon me. This gave me more motivation to triage bugs that I read pretty much all issues today and contributed around 18 patches as of today with a major contribution to get correct class source code. I also reported my first security vulnerability in cookiejar which I am fixing now. I also triaged around 50+ issues this year. So I can’t ask for a better year :)

Read, write and (travel)?

I got a Kindle last year so this gave me easy access to books which also eases purchasing books that you will never read. I gifted a couple of books and find books to be good gifts and also easy to select ;) I also started writing more technical posts instead of the emotional rants in 2017 and wrote around 21k words very close to last year. The blog also got improved readership this year with traffic from organic search and posting it on social media handles that encourages me to write more next year with around 10 views per day.

As a challenge I thought to attend conferences given my shy and introverted nature. I attended two Python conferences with one in Chennai and other in Hyderabad. For the first time I sort of planned on my own and went somewhere outside of the state to stay there for three days. I got to meet some new friends. I gave two talks on Python this year. So travel and conferences were welcome new additions this year. I am planning to attend more over next year too.

Books I read this year :

Please don’t ask me about current reading list that triggers my tsundoku :(

Friends forking on

So I turned 25 this year completing almost quarter of a century and thus officially enjoying quarter life crisis. As life moves on with college and career you get different set of friends in each place. Rinse and repeat. This is also the time where people change careers seeking new stuff and get married. So some of my friends got married this year, some of them next year and some got engaged.

Aaaaand this is the time you get the dreaded question “So, when are you getting married?”. You have a good job, decent savings as if you have filled all the parameters to a function completing the arity also considering partner to go through programming puns for a lifetime ;) It’s also the time not your family but friends start asking this (me too) that kind of makes you annoyed. You could also have friends who call after several years and you can pretty much guess they are getting married ;) So yeah there it is with people moving on with new family, job, country, etc. Time flies and it’s like I blinked and I am 25 . Fortunately, there are no regressions this year among people and I have less to rant about. I will continue with the answer of await marriage(timedelta(days=2*365)) and possibly get to this post once done to fix the TODO.

Health regressions

Nothing critical in short term but symptoms of long term issues

Now we come to the darker aspects of the year. From time to time I get advice to sleep early and stretch out a little given the nature of my bob with no physical activity. Developers and pretty much many creative jobs have the kind of flow state where you are hooked and can go on for prolonged sessions fixing bugs. It’s cool when you get there but you also start developing some bad habits over the course. Like one example is that interesting bugs require me to sit for a long time that when you have the urge to piss you sort of defer to a point where you use some cause like going to a meeting or something to take a piss. Drinking water is another one where things are neglected over short term that look great and get back to you on the long term.

I used to fantasise over long nights and sitting for a long time that seemed like I was too productive at night (in fact I am) but caused me inconsistent sleep cycles and hurts both eyes and back. This is not about staying up at night but about consistent and peaceful sleep cycles. There is also a nature of mine where I tend to treat my body as an artifact where it just works and it’s fine ignoring some symptoms that are minor but can end up in deep vicious habits that are hard to change over the course of time. I wrote about it last year. I have little improvement over this. I don’t have a clear plan over this or I am not going to a buy a shoe to go for a run tomorrow morning.

Open source also takes a similar route that there is very thin line between motivation and obsession that can lead you to make unhealthy expectations about yourself though community knows it’s volunteered and time. I need to find some balance over stop answering emails at times to relax. This might sound crazy and yeah I can hear you saying if you gotta sleep then sleep, need to take a piss? then take a piss. But I think people who are over these habits know it’s kind of hard to give up and hope I get better (at least not worse) next year.

Ad-libbing adulthood

This kind of follows the same pattern as forking on section where you have responsibilities to take care of like learning to invest, plan your future that had been low priority factors when you started with a career. It’s not about churning away money but it’s a phase where it can happen. Next year my savings are going for home construction and I am back to ground zero of savings. In fact I have to also keep up with the lifestyle I am living (not a jones currently) to make sure I adapt with time and also not to worry too much about them in the due course of responsibility.

It sort of felt adulthood would ensure automatic maturity over time but still I am not good at handling some scenarios and responsibilities. I will leave this here with thoughts from Calvin’s dad .

Conclusion

So there it is a great year with the traditional concerned thoughts around the end giving me points to improve. Thanks everyone who got until here. Writing could have been little long and unexpected positivity out of my blog. Do let mw know about the post. I also have disqus emojis enabled for the site. Wishing you a pretty rad year ahead.

P.S. Don’t make off-by-one jokes about early new year wish please :)

$ git merge 2018
$ git checkout -b 2019