2012: Year in Review

The Good

• Finished my four years of college. The nightmare ends at last.
• Rediscovered my love for hip-hop music, all thanks to /r/HipHopHeads. More on this in another post.
• Technology for the sake of technology is no fun. In the past, I wasted a lot of my time and energy on mildly interesting tools and programming languages when I could’ve been building useful software using more practical technology. 2012 was the year practicality finally beat purity.
• Started writing software for myself. I intend to eventually polish up and release this software for public consumption.
• Started maintaining proper information hygiene. More on this in another post.
• Became more organized. More on this in another post.

The Bad

• Have to take a few more exams in May before I get my degree.
• Stopped exercising. Shameful.
• Only read five books in the entire year. Doubly shameful.
• Almost everyone I know is now in Bangalore while I’m stuck in Delhi.

The Ugly

• Lost a friend to cancer.
• Started a business, but shuttered it after a few months of work.

Highlights

• Best movie watched: Forrest Gump
• Best book read: Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
• Best musicians discovered: Eyedea, MF DOOM
• Favorite albums of the year: First Born by Eyedea & Abilities, The Many Faces of Oliver Hart by Eyedea, Theatre is Evil by Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra
• Favorite new programming language: Go
• Favorite new software: Sublime Text 2, Clementine, LastPass

What Next?

• Release one or two useful webapps into the wild.
• Learn Go and build a webapp with it.
• Further streamline my web development and deployment workflow.
• Learn my technology stack better. This means learning more about the capabilities of nginx, PostgreSQL, uWSGI and of course Django and Flask.
• Start keeping track of how I spend my time. If you can measure it, you can optimize it.
• Start keeping track of the movies I watch, the books I read, and the music I listen to.
• Read more. Twenty-five books is an achievable goal for 2013.
• Read less SciFi and genre fiction.
• Exercise. I have been intending to start with the Convict Conditioning bodyweight training program for the last three months. The new year is as good an excuse as any to start having some fun!
• Explore New Delhi more and get involved in local community events.
• Move to Bangalore by the end of the year.
• Super secret goal.

This was an year of many small epiphanies, and one or two big ones ones. Those deserve little mention, though, since us silly inexperienced twentysomethings have epiphanies all the fucking time.

Anyway, happy new year to everyone reading this. Make it one worth remembering!