2022 is about to end. It is that time when I say goodbye to one more year in my life and welcome a new one. 2022 was a hectic year for me. Many of my decisions this year will have rippling effects for years to come. But there was also a good realization that I must take action; sitting idle won’t help. As always, I have divided this review into those areas of my life where I have been putting more focus throughout the year.
Life sometimes takes such unexpected turns that we humans can only stand still and wonder. That’s what happened to me. Just two months back, I was urging my father to stop talking to me about my marriage plans, and here I am today, announcing my engagement. It is how the sequence of events has been in my life in the last two months. However, I am not at all troubled with all these sudden turns and twists.
Note: This post was originally written on Jan 26, 2022 but I never posted it. Posting it now keeping the original authoring date, but with commit date of Aug 05, 2022. Sometimes, life presents you with some choices that it becomes tricky to choose any one of them. Last year, my turn came when I was selected for a prestigious job at Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). I was chosen for the post of Scientist in the organization.
Note: This post was originally written on Jan 22, 2022 but I never posted it. Posting it now keeping the original authoring date, but with commit date of Aug 05, 2022. After three years at Cisco, I finally decided to explore other opportunities in 2021. 22/01/2022 was my last day in Cisco. It has been an exhilarating journey. Even more so because it was my first such journey. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Cisco, both professionally and personally.
2021 was a year of realigning priorities for me. I started the year with a set of goals, expectations, and an enthusiasm to achieve these, and here I am, ending the year with entirely different objectives and perspectives. There were a few ups and downs throughout the year, but collectively, these have transformed me into a more fitter, confident, enthusiastic, and curious version of my past self. Health If you read this blog regularly, you may know that I have been struggling to make health a priority in my life for the last few years.
I turned 25 in the week gone by. I have been on the earth for a quarter of a century now, and the feelings are mixed. I love to write about myself, even at the risk of overexposing myself to the general world. This helps me in remembering my younger self. That, I think, is the best yardstick to judge myself against. Unfortunately, while I should write positive things, the tone of most of my personal experience articles tends to be negative.
While I thought of writing this review on 31st December, I couldn’t overcome my laziness. It has been a persistent problem with me in 2020, which I haven’t been able to fix as of now. On average, the year 2020 was a good year for me. It wasn’t equally forgiving to me on every issue of my life, but it was most undoubtedly lenient on the issues I consider most important at this phase of my life.
I completed two years at Cisco in August recently. I think it is a good time to jot down my learnings and experiences from the past two years. It was my first corporate job; however, I did not land up in a typical software development job. Hence, my experiences are quite different and unique in a sense. I joined Cisco in 2018. As it usually happens with university recruits, I was also randomly assigned to a team in the Office of CTO in Security Business Group (SBG) in Cisco.
It has been three months since 2020 started. I was not able to keep up with my yearly habit of posting year reviews due to some reasons. One primary reason behind my negligence is my disinterest in writing on this blog. I felt that it was because the old layout of this blog had been too recurrent for me. So, I decided to fix that issue before thinking about writing.
The year 2018 has been quite a roller coaster year for me. I saw many ups and downs, many successes, and many failures faced many challenges on the personal front and struggled to keep myself on track. I have been working hard on improving my lifestyle (not materialistically) for the last few years, and the benefits have begun to show up now. This year was a pinnacle in that aspect. A lot of micro changes happened in my life this year.
When I was in eighth (or was it ninth?) class, one of our teachers asked in the class, what do you want to become in your life? People said a lot of things. When my turn came up, I stood up and said, “Mein software engineer banana chahta hu” (I want to become a software engineer). It was not that I was genuinely interested in Computers. When I look back now, I realize that it was my cousins who affected my choice (in an indirect way), and their achievements fascinated me to aim at this particular career choice.
Four years ago, in this very month of June, JEE Mains results were out. I had screwed up my JEE Advanced, so I had to settle for an NIT. My AIR was good enough to get me a seat of Computer Science and Engineering in any of the NITs except the first three (at that time Trichy, Warangal, and Surathkal). I was skeptical about going to NIT Calicut because of its distance from my native place, so NIT Allahabad was the most suitable choice.
Now that I am graduated from NIT Calicut, one more chapter of my life is over. It is time to move on to the next page, but before I begin that phase, I thought it would be nice, to sum up, the experience that I gathered in NIT Calicut. The last four years have been great for me. I learned a lot of new life lessons, but there were some decisions that I could have avoided.
I first heard about Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in my second year (2016). It was quite fascinating to know that such a program exists (possibly because of that super attractive amount of money, $5500 at that time). I researched about it and sent emails to some mentors. The replies were mostly encouraging, but I still could not gather the courage to apply as I used to doubt my capabilities. Then last year (2017) again, I decided that I should try for GSoC one more time.
I know I am very late in writing this post. It has been almost one and a half months since the last edition of FOSSMeet is over. I have been a part of FOSSMeet both as a participant and a volunteer. I want to share some of my observations, views, and suggestions through this post. I intend to keep a memory of my most favorite event of NIT Calicut. Juniors can read this post and think about ways to improve FOSSCell and FOSSMeet.
Today, I deactivated my Facebook account again. For the last few days, I was feeling that I am using Facebook excessively. It was affecting my work, my public life. I was using Facebook day in and day out. Today when I woke up in the morning, I first opened Facebook and didn’t leave my bed for one hour. I realized that I had wasted one hour merely browsing through useless stuff.
I bought a new domain a few days back - yashagarwal.in. I was trying to buy this domain for the last two years, but it was already taken. My previous domain, yashagarwal.me that I got for free via GitHub education pack, was good enough for me, but the thought that I own a domain which is a top-level domain of some other country was in itself something which was not comfortable to me.
If I have to define 2017 in one word, that would be amazing. This year has been a life-changing year for me. I learned a lot of new things, had some excellent experience in the company of amazing people, had a great time in my academic life and SSL. 2017 has been a very significant year for me, and I want to record this memory by documenting some of the most amazing things that I learned and experienced this year.
One more edition of FOSSMeet'17 was successfully organized in NIT Calicut recently. As an active member of the organizing team of this year’s edition (though I sidelined myself at the end) and a keen but silent observer, I want to share my experience, ideas, and some observations through this post. Marketing Website We started planning the next edition of FOSSMeet sometime around September. Not many people were interested in planning. Anyway, Shrimadhav and I began working on the marketing website.