Year 2019 in review

Professional

I read just enough books to complete the Goodreads 2019 challenge. Following were the books that I read.

1. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
2. Vetri Vendumenil by Balakumaran
3. Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan
4. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
5. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
6. Fullstack React: The Complete Guide to ReactJS and Friends by Anthony Accomazzo - My Notes

Side Projects

I launched recommendedreads.in, a site that helps to choose the most recommended books for book lovers. This site was built using newly acquired Python skills. Also, Django was an incredible fit for a site which required heavy admin features for the data management. For this year, I learnt react.

I and arunmozhi built a visual dashboard to analyze the LokShaba 2019 Election Results in a record 24 hours.

My Stack Overflow reputation grew from 5207 to 6856, a 31% fetching me a node.js silver badge.

Mobile

My mobile is still minimal. I'm using Screen Time to manage the internet access and time I spent on my mobile. On an average, my mobile usage is about 43 mins/day.

Donations

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, MiniKeePass, Wikipedia, Mozilla and Debian

Personal

Finance

Based on the learning that I got, I consciously started working on creating my own financial plans to meet my needs. Got a term insurance that covers 5 times of my annual salary. I think I'll continue to improve on this throughout 2020.

Health

When this year started, I was 74kg, now I'm at 78. This is one of the action item for me to work on 2020.

Family

What they say about having a kid is true. Your day slows down. You start to think in ways that were unknown to you up until then. You have to constantly reprioritize all your work to get anything done. You have to learn to plan your work to be done in a discrete fashion. This is what I and Lakshmi mostly were doing all this year. Keeping dhruvan as our only priority and having everything else around him. Putting our conveniences away, just to be available to him all the time.

We created memories in as many things as we could. Happiness to us, at this phase of our life, was to watch dhruvan turn 1. Everything else can wait.

In a true sense, Life becomes more meaningful once You become a parent.

Goals for 2020

I have set myself 5 goals for 2020 based on my priorities

1. Bring down mobile usage to 30mins/day.
2. Ship at least one side project.
3. Complete at least one item from my bucket list.
4. Go deep and reinvent the wheel for at least some of the items I do.
5. Focus on health.

2019 was unique in its own way. Hope 2020 will be great for all of us.