I wrote a log last year and it felt good over writing for the last 2 years so here I am writing back about another year of good and bad stuff. Since this year marks the end of a decade I guess I will put a fair warning that this might be longer than usual

  • Open source promotions
  • New job in a new city
  • Read, write and travel
  • Arranged marriage alliance

Open source promotions

I continued to work on CPython this year. I got my first security patch for http.cookiejar which led me to find another one on the module. This was assigned CVE-2018-20852. It was a fairly tricky bug though the fix was simple and I can say it’s one of the best bugs for the year. I kept helping in mock module maintenance and also got some new contributors working on the module. AsyncMock by Lisa Roach got merged and I contributed some patches and design thoughts to the feature that landed in Python 3.8 .

I was also mentored by Andrew Svetlov and Victor Stinner this year which was very helpful. Andrew nominated me to attend core dev sprints that happened at London this year where I got to meet other core devs. I was happy that I attended it despite my doubts since I never implemented a big change. Yury was kind enough to mentor me during the sprints. It deserves a post on it’s own that you can read more about. I was also offered Google Open Source Peer Bonus award this year thanks to Samuel Freilich for nominating me and Google for the program given that it’s my first paycheck for contributing to open source which makes it more special.

I was also nominated for my core dev promotion with the vote ending today fitting as a new year gift and the result was something I never expected as I haven’t implemented anything like a big feature. I am thankful for all the comments in the thread and very much happy and positive about a thing in life perhaps in a long long time. Thanks to my mentors Andrew Svetlov and Victor Stinner along with all the devs who helped me throughout this journey. I am looking forward to contribute more towards open source.

New job in a new city

I was in Chennai for the last 5 years. I left my hometown after college for the job to Chennai which is 450kms away from home. I got to work at Aspire Systems. Later I switched to HappyFox by 2016. It’s been 3 years and I was looking for a change. Bangalore was a more lucrative option given the amount of companies. I am thankful for my referral from my friend Vinay Keerthi. I was offered a position of Senior Software Engineer at Visa Inc. The offer and work at Visa also seemed to be interesting along with the brand value of Visa and working with my friend.

I took the offer and relocated to Bangalore. To be honest first few weeks where tough given that it’s the first time I am out of Tamil Nadu with respect to food, language and locals. But Bangalore was more friendly in weather compared to drenching hot summer in Chennai. I was offered relocation at a hotel and later moved in with my other friend Sudhakar from Aspire Systems. It also helps in being in the same city as my school friend Thilakan. I got used to the food and also found some friendly local food shops. So it’s been 3 months and good. I will later expand on it probably next year. Another perk is that it reduces 100kms in my journey while traveling home so there is that with pros and cons.

Read, write and travel

I read and wrote a lot of code than books to be honest this year. My posts were also less but gained a fair share of traffic that the blog collected close to 20k pageviews this year which is amazing for the low number of posts. With respect to travel I went to Bangalore for both relocation and interviews. I travelled to London for the sprints which was my first international trip and something to check out of my bucket list this year. I traveled back to Chennai for PyCon and with reverse booking of the flight tickets over the round trip as if I am at Chennai was a memorable lesson. So it was a tough year with respect to books but I hope to read more or at least pretend and hope to next year ;)

Arranged marriage alliances

As with every other Indian family it was marriage time. So you can read a whole lot about the arranged marriage tradition in India around the internet. Given my low social and literally nil dating skills my parents were hopeful over finding a potential match. Of course it had some rejections over the asset I own, a US visa, green card etc. But it was a normal tradition in India. We also started building a house where almost all my savings went. I am more of a person looking for liquid cash but then again a paid house to live in later while I have less responsibilities seemed to be a good deal or at least I should start pretending like that to my parents.

I was generally under the assumption over the whole arranged marriage alliance seeking to be implemented using random.choice but then again can I keep complaining without making any efforts on my own. I was nervous and little confused over if the whole thing works. Hmm, it seems it does and also leads to better life despite the increased responsibilities. It also comes under the notion over balancing open source work, travel plans and accommodating for my partner’s plans too. Things do seem to fall into places while I continue to solve this puzzle called love with my partner in a parallel tmux. I might even learn a bit about the commerce of love and relationships ;)

So I hope to update you all for a good news by 2020 as my merge request is being reviewed and approved to be dealt under a CI of traditional and emotional tests for the relationship to succeed as a build to my production life that I will continue to cherish.

tl;dr decade

The decade was a transformational one from being a student in high school to graduating with an Electrical degree from a good institution that taught me more about people and shaped me than my actual knowledge about transistors. I also started my career as a software developer and just like that 5 years went away learning more about people, relationships and progress. So a tldr could be college student (2010-2014), career (2014-) and open source contributor (2018-).

Conclusion

So it was a great decade with respect to finally getting things I love with a lot of memories to cherish for the several decades to come. Thanks for all the memories and mistakes. Wish you all a happy and lovely new year.

$ git merge 2019
$ git commit --with-love "A weird and lovely year called 2019. An unforgettable decade."
$ git checkout -b 2020
$ git commit --allow-empty "Hindsight is 20/20 ;)"