2020 was a year completely different from rest of the years in the decade due to covid-19 pandemic. A lot happened in what feels like a short span of time.

Got married

Arranged marriage is a common tradition in India. Last year search was on to get married and got more intense towards the end of 2019. I met her on November 1, Karnataka day in a nearby temple. The time given to speak to each other was around 2 minutes. So the time to take a life-changing decision is kind of difficult but we went ahead with trusting it will turn out to be okay. The marriage was initially planned around February but got postponed to May end since I planned to attend PyCon US. I also started a new job by October 2019 so I thought to accrue more leaves for marriage to stay home but little did I know at that time what 2020 had for me in terms of staying home.

7 months were long and short in getting to know each other. Despite our ABI incompatibilities like me being a non-vegetarian and she being an ultra-pure vegetarian who doesn’t even likes smell of egg we had trust that we will be happy living together. She initially had grand plans for marriage since Indian marriages are usually extravagant but covid-19 had other plans. I lost my grandmother in February who was very much looking forward to my marriage. By March we had a trial lockdown on Sunday. I got home by Friday thinking this will just be a trial like how can you lockdown a country of billion people. But then the inevitable happened and India went on full lockdown and luckily I just got home before it started with my laptop. No one knew the magnitude of the lockdown. It was something I never experienced since my birth and even something my parents and grand parents never experienced going on a month long lockdown.

Given the pandemic we had thoughts to postpone the marriage but it just adds more uncertainty as time passes and there was a cultural shift towards getting married with only very close relatives attending the marriage. So we decided to go ahead with the dates. Initial plan was to send around 2000 invitations to friends and relatives but due to lockdown we only had around 50 people from my side and 50 people from her side attending the wedding. It took place in my house and a small temple since there were restrictions. I used 5 days of marriage leave and 4 days of paid leave since we are not traveling anywhere and are just staying home.

From a cost perspective it was a very good thing. We just finished building our own house without a loan and the initial plans for marriage were just additional financial burden for a two day function. I guess lot of people liked the format that there were lot of people getting married in friends and family circle since it saves money over food, venue that you can spend on something for yourself. Also the hassle of organizing such functions requires a lot of coordination and results in marriage fatigue.

Work from home

This was the first time I stayed at home for a long time in 12 years when I left to hostel for school, college and then moved to work from Chennai. Initially, I was expecting work from home to be for few months and to end by August or so. But given the different phases of pandemic I am still not sure of the timeline by which I will go to office. It was hard to focus for a few weeks since getting to office and working from there was a routine. As much as working from was a comfort and increased flexibility it was hard to focus while working from home. But over a period of time I got used to it and now I generally like it better.

WFH provides good home food and you can spend more time with family since I usually met my family once in a month for 6 while staying 400km away from home for work. I also developed the habit of taking afternoon naps more these days which used to be a college time habit. As with great power comes great responsibilities, my general physical work got reduced. I got used to walking less to get something and gained weight along with developing a belly that I plan to reduce by 2021 (Hello new year resolutions!).

Another major thing I like about WFH is that it saves cost. Cost of living is very low and since we have a farm land we grow veggies in our own land. Food comes free, no rent since there is new house. So savings increased to something like 95% of the total salary giving me more room to invest and save for future since marriage also means more emergency fund, health insurance, etc. Overall I should accept I got lazy enough that getting back to Bangalore and spending on food, rent will be annoying for a few months. As much as I wish for the pandemic to end I also wish there is more adoption towards flexible workplace options like hybrid, optional remote, permanent remote etc. which a lot of companies are exploring.

More code

2020 started with becoming a Python core developer and also getting Google’s Open Source Peer Bonus award for my work on CPython. I got involved in fixing and reporting issues towards Python 3.x migrations. I created a project to clone all top 3000 PyPI projects and report potential problems towards Python 3 migration and upgrades to Python 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10. It was a very interesting project that took a lot of time in 2020. I also got to work with Fedora’s Python upgrade and fixed issues reported in their tracker. So my priorities shifted from CPython core to ecosystem level issues. Some of the statistics are as below :

  • GitHub contributions - 1590
  • 600+ issues reported
  • 400+ PRs created

As much as I wrote more code I also read low. I added only one blog post in 2020. I didn’t complete reading at least one book this year. Some of it could also be attributed towards my general laziness and disinterest towards finding good topics to read or blog about. I hope to bring them back to pre-covid levels by 2021 ;)

More responsibilities

As much as a lot happened in 2020 it also meant more responsibilities. Since I got married the general social circle expands. Now I get to meet more people. Attend more functions. I also need to plan more towards the future taking into account all of these. This starts from taking an insurance for wife to fundamental changes in spending to save more, invest more, etc. So you only get to grow responsibilities and expenses. They just never stop.

Since my old house was like 30 years old that has holes allowing rain drops and floor becomes wet in rainy season. I got used to living in there but we planned to build a new house. I was naive at that time and spent all savings into house without taking a loan. Looking back it’s good that I have a house without loan but that also means less money during marriage. It sort of created a financial strain and covid-19 made marriage expenses low enough that we spent only around 5-10% of what we planned.

This creates a general shift in living once you are married that now you have more things to worry about, plan about and also the importance of savings, liquidity, etc. in terms of money, expenses, social outlook etc. I must also look at this in a way that my general financial outlook like spending remains more or less proportionately same and not to go overboard due to peer pressure of buying things you can’t afford just to show off. This also lead me to apply for a credit card first time and different aspects of credit though I never got a loan or credit. It also led me to think about what you can afford and what you cannot buy but not afford.

Conclusion

I am pretty sure everyone will have a long post like this in a way that you can always remember 2020 changing you in one way or other with the pandemic placing us in a zone never imagined. I hope things get better since there are already 3 approved vaccines at the time of writing. As much as we had different experience with 2020 both good and bad I hope we can safely merge the experience and delete the branch to move on hoping the decade gets better.

Happy holidays! Stay safe!

Pushes to git and munches gilebi