2019 in an Oyster's Shell-I

Okay, when you’re reading this, I am 2020% sure that you wont be in 2019.😝

2019 ended as every year ends, FAST and obviously fucked. Mine was just same… There were a lot of good things that happened like making this blog and becoming old. 2019 wasn’t that harsh on me like the years before that.

I got to do a lot of stuff I wished to do. I learned lots of stuff. Explored much,travelled much…

Let me try to recollect stuff in the order of Months

January

On December 31st,2018 at about 11pm, I received an email regarding the GitHub Campus Experts Program. It stated that my first review was over and I had to improve on stuff. Okay that is not a good one to start the year with but hey I thought that was for the good. 2018 has given me its last blow.

2019 in January was full of mixed feelings and wishes…I was still in my S1 then. Specifically I was writing my first sem exams, without knowing which was would I fail first. My new year resolution for 2019 was to improve my profile in GitHub. I started commiting for the first 15 days in one of my private repositories. I did that, by thinking GitHub could be my perfect “Dear Diary”.

On Jan 14th I went to Kochi-Muziris Bienale. I’m not that much of an art fan but I went there for meeting Sir Richard Stallman, the then FSF Head. Since I was bored by art, I walked nearly 1km to go to the nearest beach and stayed there till noon and again walked 2km to mattanchery to get food. I also got to meet a lot of wonderful student developers in central kerala. I still keep contact with most of them. I met Devdutt Shenoi, Sreeram, Kiran, Subin, Abhijith, George and many others whom I have forgotten the names. 2019’s first Biriyani happened on the same day which was with My dad who then worked in Mattanchery and it was at Kayees, t’was a kidu biriyani.

Exams were now over and we were planning to host a Hackathon in college. We had a team set and all, and we planned.

I went to Velaimkanni in Tamil Nadu that month and got an email at 4am in the morning that my 2nd review for the campus experts program was done and i still needed to be improved. And again college, January ended pretty good and 11% of 2019 was done.

February

February was the month which helped me cross off the first thing in my Year checklist, Becoming a Campus Expert. That happened by 24th of February. Thats the best thing I remember in February. I got a project to do for our department’s library. I moved from Windows to Linux and met Sharad Joe,Namitha,Chrisbin, Sumithran and Akshaya at School of AI Kottayam’s first meetup in Kottayam. I got my Hacktoberfest Swags that month.

March

In the first week of March, I had a video call from GitHub about the Campus Experts. She was the program manager and that was the first time I had a one-to-one conversation with a person not from India. I got to meet a lot of people from different parts of the world and India itself. I was so excited to join the program and thus I became the Campus Expert from Kerala. I got to be featured in Gopi Chettan’s whatspp status and in TinkerHub’s official Instagram and twitter handles.

We named our Hackathon Meenachil/Meen Hacks and Iwas in charge of Sponsorship and Website. I had donemuch work on that.

April

Our college’s Techincal fest was that month but I couldn’t enjoy much since I was suffering from severe Asthma.
I got my swags from GitHub being a campus expert. This included a Hoodie, a Bag and a GitHub Campus Experts Flag. April was okay and it was the time we were meant to host our Hackathon but due to technical issues we had to postpone it. Our S1 results came that month. Those were tough times, and postponing the hackathon had left us low in confidence. The 2nd Sememster exams were also upon us.

May

I discoverd Termux which could be used to run code on Android. And since my PC was on strike I had to use Termux. I learned Vim and NeoVim and became big fans of it. Study Leaves and Exams.

June

June was full of exams and code. June was a good month. I wrote code on my Phone. I wrote Wakatime Metrics with Json in this time. Just the next day after my Physics University exam, I commited the initial one for this blog. I wrote the first two blogs on my Phone. People were telling that I was lying when I told them that I coded my blog on my phone

July

My birthmonth. I was home most of the time due to sem break. Nothing good came that month.

August

I went to my first ever hackathon and that was in Bangalore too. My teammate was Devdutt and that was my travels for the first time. It was also the month were gonna conduct MeenHacks but on the day before the Hackathon, we had to cancel the event due to imminent rains. I was totally depressed for 2 weeks after the event postponed…Again. Kerala again went to flood mode. I contributed to Kerala Rescue by opening an Issue and Submi tting a PR review.

Rest on Part 2