Year in Review 2018
There isn’t a WOW moment I am experiencing while writing this review like I did the year before! The year 2018 overall felt a bit slowed down compared to the previous one. It feels that way primarily due to the same nature of travel/professional/personal activities, transitioning to a new department at work, change of visa status, etc. I stayed indoors as much as being in the wild. I tried but couldn’t make any progress in the personal and side project’s goals that I had made towards the beginning of this year. Uh-oh! It is hard to juggle between a full-time job that you are in love with, a passion list and too much distractions in between ;-) By just looking at my Github activity I can tell, when I stopped volunteering for the coding project I had signed up for and why. Still, in this realm of not-so-happening-things, those little things that brought me joy and humor through my work/travel/personal and family time are going to be a part of this review.
January — March
- Could attend Wikimedia Hackathon 2018 in Barcelona only because I managed to wrap up the Schengen Visa process quicker than I anticipated with help from a Scrape Soup Send python script I wrote which notified me when a visa appointment became available.
- My Github comment in response to someone’s post containing disruptive content emerged as a post on Reddit.
- Collaborated with Mozilla’s Open Source Student Network (OSSN) and POSSE initiative, whose contributors I met at the LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts to further support student contributors on the Wikimedia projects.
- Flew a kite, rode a camel and watched some goats with family in the Thar desert.
- Created my first Wikipedia article on an Indian illustrator Kaveri Gopalakrishnan who made a Google Doodle for 2018’s International Women’s Day!
April — June
- Finally, got a California driver’s license after several failed attempts! Could explore a few but not all neighborhoods easily only as a result of this: Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, Muir Woods National Monument, Lick Observatory, Sausalito, Point Reyes, Lake Tahoe, Santa Cruz, Middlesex Fells Reservation.
- Family members visited me for the first time in San Francisco.
- Met my favorite spirit animal Penguin (lots of them), for the first time on the African continent.
- Developed a Gerrit newcomer bot (Github repository) to welcome new developers and track their patches. Link to the blog post.
July — September
- Spent some time with a close friend investigating why IRCTC might not be working in the United States, dealing with their customer care, blogging about the experience, and reaching out to senior executives both at IRCTC (and similar platforms relying on the service) informing them about the problem. My friend and I speculated that this got the site back up and running which was down for more than a month.
- Made small contributions to a few Wikimedia projects: Extension:RevisionSlider, WikiEdu, Toolforge in my volunteer capacity to learn about how diverse tech ecosystem is at Wikimedia. Link to my activity log.
October — December
- Enjoyed being more hands-on! Investigated and improved MediaWiki Action API docs and developed code sample and tutorials (Github repository) demonstrating how to use various modules of the MediaWiki API (ongoing)
- Mentoring a portion of the project mentioned above for the first time in Outreachy (ongoing)
- Sponsored a girl child’s education through World Vision. There are people all around the world that need help. If you have a few bucks to spare, do consider donating/sponsoring.
- Reduced screen time and activity on social media platforms for sanity! Still a minimalist, going strong year by year.
- A bit more organized: now use a password manager, store all documents in the cloud and contribute photos to Wikimedia Commons.
I’m hoping to continue this tradition of writing yearly reviews no matter how much boring they might sound as I get old :D Indeed it is a fun activity! Few hours are remaining still, for my sister and I to cook some pasta and bake cake to celebrate the new beginnings! Looking forward to an exciting year ahead!
Happy New Year 2019 ❤
