Year in Review 2019

To sum up — 2019, for me, was a year of strenuous hikes, long drives in the suburbs, mentoring, learning a new programming language, and exploring new ideas for side projects! It was also a year of many afternoons at work. Evenings were spent strolling around the lake in the neighborhood, sometimes playing with the piano and sometimes with code. In the first half of the year, I was motivated to find an idea for a side project that I could stick to, and the second half in making progress on it. Sticking around and continuing to fiddle with a side-project hasn’t been my forte till now. But I’m trying and I want to see where it goes. Turning 30 was magical; it also had a positive effect on my psyche. Overall, I enjoyed being content, at peace, and calm. Here is how I spent the year:

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January–March

• Released an introductory course around Web APIs on Github that I co-designed with @tuxology for high school students. We ran two workshops using the course — for participants of a ChickTech event and Stanford University’s Treehacks Hackathon.
• Took a Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Los Angeles with my sister that gave me an insight into how films are made in Hollywood. We saw sets of the famous TV show “Friends” among many others.
• The best thing that happened to me this year — I turned 30! I spent my 30th birthday with my sister at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland.
• Delivered a talk at LibrePlanet 2019 entitled “Sharing global opportunities for new developers in the Wikipedia community”. It wasn’t easy; speaking doesn’t come naturally to me.
• Attended the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin to contribute to the scoping phase of the Wikimedia’s 2030 movement strategy in the Technology area and participated in a Training of Trainers workshop.
• Fortunate to become a part of the Wogrammer community of women in stem and be interviewed for their blog.

April–June

• Found myself falling for mountains and started spending weekends doing small hikes in and around the Bay Area in Mount Diablo (visited a few times), Big Sur and Little Yosemite. It was possible as I had started to drive more comfortably, and was indeed a pleasure to discover my inner peace and happiness in this way.
• Mentored ~4 students via Google Summer of Code and Outreachy to work on 3-month long Wikimedia projects. One of these projects was related to the development of the WikiContrib tool for community members to visualize their technical contributions within a specified time range. Remaining were related to developing code samples and tutorials explaining the use of MediaWiki API.
• Attended the Wikimedia Hackathon at Prague’s National Library of Technology — contributed to the mentoring program for newcomers, a couple of projects including a web showcase of interactive demo apps built using the MediaWiki Action API.
• For long in my to-do list was visiting the Agastya Foundation (I love what they do and their mission) based out of Bangalore and investigating the possibility to collaborate with them. I did make it happen this year! While on a ~15-hour plane ride back home to California, reading wonderful stories of projects students of Agastya made for the benefit of their community gave birth to an idea for a research study that I’m on.

July–September

• Yet another year, my favorite conference that I feel privileged to attend remains the same. This year’s Wikimania took place in Stockholm in Sweden, a country that I also got a chance to visit for the first time! It was a joy to contribute to a variety of activities of the conference, run workshops on technical topics, and develop materials for it (more details).
• Evenings and some weekends went into co-developing the mobile app for the research project inspired by and for children of the Agastya Foundation. I learned to develop in React Native and got to do mobile development after a long time; it was a happy quarter of the year :)
• Also grew fearless by now, and did some more strenuous hikes — Lassen Peak Trail (Lassen Volcanic National Park), Berry Creek Falls Loop (the longest one of ~11.7 miles in Big Basin Redwoods State Park), Hike to Vernal Falls via John Muir Trail (Yosemite), and Dipsea, Steep Ravine, and Matt Davis Loop (Stinson Beach).

October–December

• Conducted two sessions around Wikimedia’s outreach programs and small wiki toolkits project at WikiConference North America in Cambridge.
• Mentored a lot of Google Code-in students on a wide variety of Wikimedia tasks.
• Road trip from Seattle to Vancouver mostly for the fun of crossing a country’s border ;-) Visiting Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, and Vancouver’s Stanley Park were the highlights of this trip.
• The last few weeks were all about weeping over the situation in my home country, planning for the upcoming workshop with Agastya Foundation in Bangalore, documenting things and wrapping-up tasks from this year!

TV shows & movies, books, and music that I sometimes watched, listened and read: Abstract: The Art of Design, Inside Bill’s Brain, Free Solo, Into the Wild, Dream Girl, Super 30, Eddie Vedder, The Creative Indians, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education.

My resolution for 2020? Ain’t making one; I would like to go with the flow and keep doing things that bring me joy. I wish you all have peace and harmony in your life in the years to come.

Happy New Year 2020 ❤