Episode 10: New Year Special, 2010 Edition

Note: I originally posted this article on a personal blog I ran when I was in my late teens and early twenties. I discovered in May 2020 that the Internet Archive had preserved the contents of that blog in its entirety, including some of the media. That blog was an important part of my personal history, so I reposted all of that content on this website for archival purposes. While my politics, opinions, and outlook on the world have changed radically since I wrote those posts between 2009 and 2011, it’s good to know that I was as much of an idiot then as I am now.

It’s December 31st, 2009, at least here in New Delhi. A glorious year is ending, and another (potentially) glorious year is just around the corner. This is reason enough for me to put on my writing cap and add another pointless piece to A Series of Uncool Events.

Year 2008 was disappointing, to say the least. I’d love to write twenty paragraphs and explain in detail how sad year 2008 was, but that would be a waste of precious electrons. Point is, 2008 was a tragic, miserable, wretched year. Did I tell you it was distressing, depressing and pathetic? Let’s throw in “lamentable” and “piteous” for good measure. Yes, I love my thesaurus.

Now that we’ve established how gloomy year 2008 was, let’s move on to year 2009. 2009 was, in contrast, a wonderful year. It was an year of excitement, discovery and many, many changes. Here’s a quick rundown of the highs and lows of 2009, neatly categorized and methodically packaged for mass-consumption.

The Good

• Built index_server for Haiku. This was a great experience because: (1) it was the first time I got paid for writing code, (2) while working on improving indexing performance, I learned a lot about real world threading issues and (3) the BeAPI is simple, elegant, intuitive and fun to program. Moreover, Haiku is a pleasure to use. BeOS was a beautiful OS, and the Haiku community has kept that same Be spirit alive in Haiku R1A1.

• Finally got some real-world, hands-on experience with version control and build systems. Got comfortable with Vim and noticed an immediate increase in productivity.

• Met a bunch of smart people from the Indian FOSS community. Was intrigued by the variety of great software—and, sometimes, hardware—people have been building right under my nose. Impressive, and downright humbling.

• Realized Mac OS X is the One True Operating System and started learning Cocoa. One thing led to another, and now I’m building Goonj with Pratul and Nandeep.

• Made some great friends at college. The kind of people you can trust with your eyes closed.

The Bad

• After five years of using Linux on my PC, got burned-out by all the hardware, compatibility and stability issues. Using Windows 7 on the PC right now, and finding it a good enough OS for most of my needs.

• Bought a Dell laptop. My dog can design a better machine. Never again.

• Didn’t do very well at college. Ah well.

• Wrote way too many blog posts involving bulleted lists.

The Ugly

• Watched helplessly as the incessant buzz of byte-sized updates from Twitter and the so called “social media” ate away at my brain. Deleted my Twitter account a week ago.

• Was involved in an incident involving a certain carbon compound. Learned that ingesting said carbon compound is not a good idea. Never again.

So, that was year 2009. Year 2010 will be here in another 30 minutes. Let’s just hope it’s as beautiful as last year. Thank you for tuning in to A Series of Uncool Events. Good night, and a happy new year :)