Year 2018 in review

Professional

Reading

I completed Goodreads 2018 challenge reading 9 instead of 6 books. Following were the books I read.

1. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray
2. 20 Years of KDE: Past, Present and Future by Lydia Pintscher
3. The First Step is the Last Step by Jiddu Krishnamurti
4. Natural Language Processing with Python by Steven Bird
5. Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd edition by Marijn Haverbeke - My Notes
6. Dive Into Python 3 by Mark Pilgrim
7. Sell: The Art, The Science, The Witchcraft by Subroto Bagchi - My Notes
8. Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey
9. Mastering Emacs by Mickey Petersen
10. Parthiban Kanavu by Kalki
11. Ponniyin Selvan I by Kalki
12. Ponniyin Selvan II by Kalki
13. Ponniyin Selvan III by Kalki
14. Ponniyin Selvan IV by Kalki
15. Ponniyin Selvan V by Kalki

I reread book 10 through 15 this year.

Stackoverflow

I unlocked a minor achievement, when my Stackoverflow activity had an impact of ~1.0 million people. My reputation grew 3294 to 5207, 59% increase from last year.

Github

I consolidated my codes repos by moving them from BitBucket to private Github account and made 260 contributions in 2018.

Other than few upstream commits to bible database, I mostly worked on couple of new side project which I couldn't finish. Hope, I'll be able to launch them in 2019

I learnt Python-Django this year. My android side project, Commithub - a sleek client for BitBucket has crossed 100 downloads in play store.

Mobile

Uninstalled most of the apps, to cut down on the amount of time I spend on mobile. This is my current mobile screen. No reading/surfing apps except utility. I intent to maintain it this way.

Personal

There are few events in life that you shouldn’t miss. Events that your mind has no reference in the past, to relate to. Events that will make you discover yourself as you undergo. There is magic in such events when they happen for the first time.

We(I and Lakshmi) had one such moment as we were expecting to welcome a new member to our family this year. To make sweet memories, we consciously choose to spend most of our time offline. Living out one day at a time. No Twitter, No Movies, No TV. Spending time together instead of alone. We read books together. Just books and books alone, with Lakshmi. I resumed my daily diary writing habit that I’d stopped years ago. I started writing every day, capturing our progress, mindset, and excitement of each passing day. Each and every moment as it unfolds.

In the past, I’d read both Parthiban Kanavu and Ponniyin Selvan(I-V). But Lakshmi hasn't. So, we decided to read them together. We got started with Parthiban kanavu in May, Ponniyin selvan - Part I in June, Ponniyin selvan - Part II in July, Ponniyin selvan - Part III in August, Ponniyin selvan - Part IV in September and finally Ponniyin selvan - Part V in December. Dhruvan, our son was born with such memorable moments.

The best moment of the year came when I took Dhruvan for the first time in my hands right after being born. Words can't express the joy I had. We’re ever thankful to God for him.

Overall, 2018 was a blessing both personally and professionally. Hope 2019 too will be great for all of us.

Previously 2017, 2014