My Year in Review 2018
Earlier today, while going through my twitter feed, I came across several “year in review” articles. I read through some of them while sipping my afternoon coffee and then I thought of writing my own. It has been a good year with a lot of experiences and learning. Here’s a debrief.
Setup()
2018 started on a very positive and high note. It was a fresh start with mainly two new challenges ahead. One of these challenges was my new role at work - I was given the responsibility to lead and grow the consulting team at BigchainDB. The second challenge was to complete our book in time.
The first three months went by very quickly. During that time I was able to settle in my new role while also setting up processes and direction for my team. I also completed my part of our book. It was really a huge sigh of relief at the end of the first quarter. I made a quick trip to my home (India) as well. After all that work, it was a refreshing break.
Execute()
In the second and third quarters, I got a chance to travel a lot. I travelled to 4 new countries (The Netherlands, Slovakia, The US, Vietnam) and also explored some parts of Germany. I also met some very interesting people and learned a lot during this travel. All thanks to my previous employers, BigchainDB, as these were all business trips.
During the mid of the year, because of my management and business related responsibilities, I also took a brief break from programming. However, after a few weeks of almost no programming, I realized that my creative thinking is getting impacted. I was also not able to fully enjoy other aspects of work because I was missing programming.
So, I started actively coding again. This time, though, mostly on weekends as work weeks were too full of meetings and travel. The feeling of creating something from scratch is absolutely amazing and I am lucky that I can get that feeling through programming.
I also did quite a bit of public speaking during the year. I spoke at a couple of tech conferences, conducted some workshops and also spoke at the local meetups. I love to talk about tech stuff. Here’s a compilation of all the videos of my talks from 2018 - https://www.gautamdhameja.com/talks-2018/.
At the beginning of the third quarter, I made another trip to India. This time, it was my dad’s retirement celebration. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was fun to meet all the extended family members while celebrating my dad’s 40 years of professional life. Love you, Papaji. :)
It was also during the mid-year time when our book, “Beginning Blockchain”, was finally published. It has been a really proud feeling of becoming a published author.
At the start of the fourth quarter, I took a brief break from work. After years of going with the flow, I wanted to take a step back and think through things. A few weeks later, after some contemplation and several long walks (Sherlock style), I felt my next challenge should be a more technical role. And so I joined Parity Technologies as a Solutions Architect for enterprise blockchain solutions. I must say, it has been a great start to my new job.
During the year-end holidays, I completed a few of my personal projects including the migration and overhauling of this blog. This definitely added to the overall feeling of achievement for the year.
Unload()
Surely, 2018 was an amazing year for me, filled with new experiences at regular intervals. I was able to learn a lot and shared my learning too. I travelled quite a bit, met new people, tried some great food and tasted a variety of coffee.
Nothing is perfect, and neither was my year. Looking back, there are a few things that I should have done differently in 2018 - definitely more exercise (need to really shed some kilos), better sleeping habits, some more programming, less Netflix and a lot more reading.
I would like to thank all those who made my 2018 journey amazing. Hope 2019 brings in more learning, more exercise and more interesting experiences. And, I also hope to tell some jokes in the new year. :)