Writing this at Delhi airport waiting for the flight back home. I came to the capital city of India for KDE India Conference.
This blog is a part of the revolving around the sun series :
- 19 years of revolving around the sun
- 18 years of revolving around the sun
- 17 years of revolving around the sun
This birthday is very fancy :
01-20-2020 20:20:20
MM-DD-YYYY HH:mm:SS
I’m turning 20 on 20 in the year of 2020. Very fancy ! And at 20:20 (8PM) tonight, it’s the peak moment of fanciness 😂. The next such fanciness will be in the year 3030 at 1030 years old ? Nopeeeee, this is my fanciest birthday timestamp ever ! :P 😝
I have officially revolved around the sun 20 times ! Woah ! At the beginning of the last decade, I was in 5th grade and at the end, I’m in college 3rd year. That’s a lot of time eh!
A tagline that I’ve been using for the blog were “A 21st century teen”. Gonna have to replace “teen” with “millenial” or something else hehe 😁😌.
Coding
- Went to many events, networked with people
- Contributed to IndicNLP project
- I participated in my first ever International Hackathon, ETHIndia and won it !!
- Participated in national hackathon InOut. Didn’t win any thing, but learnt about P2P tech, WebTorrent and those cool stuff. Torrent is now my favorite thing
- Released Manglish app. Blog on it
- Released Varnam Editor. Blog on it
KDE
I’m now a KDE contributor ! I’m a maintainer of KDE Malayalam localization now ! This gives me a developer access to KDE’s localization SVN repo. This means I can directly push to it which is kinda dangerous too 😬.
In the post of ‘19, I shared my wish of getting selected for GSoC with KDE. I made my own project idea proposal on improving the localization experience, but the community was divided on whether implementing it. So, that went down.
But !
I implemented that proposal anyway for our Malayalam localization. And it worked ! KDE Malayalam localization is being done now on Weblate. The whole step to implement is documented here which might be useful for other localization teams.
This led me to work with the SMC Team and become a SMC contributor.
Here’s the Twitter thread on completing a part of localization and having Malayalam included with KDE after many long years.
ഒരു വെടിക്ക് രണ്ടു പക്ഷി => A contributor to both SMC & KDE.
PyCon
I attended my very first PyCon last October in Chennai. It was a very big event. Lot of people from across India attended it. Got to meet some online folks in real life. Got some swags participating in contests in some booths.
I did a lightning talk on my project Selfie A Day. It was both exciting and anxious to do a talk in front a wide audience. I have a habit of talking too fast and that helped me to finish this talk within the alloted time of 5 minutes.
Since I have to go to Chennai and it’s a conf, I wanted to make it a bit more grand. My family has never got in an aeroplane before. My first was also last year when I came back from Bangalore attending ETHIndia. So I asked my family to come with. They can see Chennai while I attend the conf.
We went to Chennai by train. We haven’t ever went on such a long journey together (Appa was never the travelling vibe person). It was a new experience for us. We enjoyed Chennai and we all got to fly back ! Amma was scared in her first flight. I love it though, the turbulences are a poor human’s way to experience almost 0g.
So much has happened to write, but it better stay as memories & photographs in our minds.
I had some savings doing freelance and used that to buy the plane tickets. I’m proud that I got to do this for my family (eldest son extra proundness :P). Amma was so happy of all this :)
UPDATE: With 2020, lockdowns, masks & air-travel not being the same anymore, we’re super glad that we did this before it all went down.
College
Academics
Just like ‘19, I was more outside of college than in. I was afraid that I won’t pass all subjects in semester 3rd last time. But that didn’t happen. I passed all subjects, but with bad grades tho. Mehhh, it’s alright.
The 5th semester exam just finished at the beginning of this month, and yes, I’m afraid there’s a chance that I’ll fail on atleast 1 subject :/ 😕.
FOSSers
FOSSers is there, but I feel like it wasn’t as active as the year previous to ‘19.
For the first time, we had a FOSS Stall in our college tech fest. We also did a online puzzle-solving competition called CrypTux, an offline treasure hunt event and more… All of the software we made/used is open sourced of course ;)
We did a Debian Packaging workshop. We got to invite Pirate Praveen and Sruthi Chandran.
Attending the workshop, one FOSSer (oh yeah, that’s a name we can call each member :D), Abhijith Sheheer digged deep into packaging. He has got more than 5 packages into Debian at the time of writing this.
We introduced Inkscape to Radhika Sharma and now she’s really good at it ! She’s making all her posters, artwork with Inkscape.
Jijin KH, Athul Raj, Muhammed Hashim worked on making a bot to easily get our college attendance. It works ! We call the bot VAASU (VAST Attendance Analyzer & Stats Utilizer) :P
We hope to do more, grander events and more contributions.
Life
The past year’s been good, though I feel I could have done more. Time is moving pretty fast. Next year, at this time, I’ll be in my last semester of college. Woah ! It was like yesterday I joined college.
I’ve always been a nostalgic person, having butterflies in stomach thinking of the past and memories. Y’know that feeling ? And I’m getting nostalgic now. Just 1 more year and my college life comes to an end. Another part of my life is going to end.
ഈ കോളേജ് കാലം ഒക്കെ ഒന്നല്ലേ ഉള്ളൂ ഫ്രണ്ടേ