I started my 2019 by ordering a hot chocolate fudge, hoping this year would be as sweet to me as my dessert and bring me as much happiness. 2019 was my first year away from home, living in an unknown city(Mumbai) while pursuing my first job at BrowserStack. As you can expect, I had all kinds of doubts, how am I going to survive, how can I stay away from home. So it was a year where I answered my question, learned a lot, and laid a strong foundation for the years to come.

Highlights of the year

Traveling

I started my travel journey this year and figured out how much I love it. Most of my plans were impromptu. Deciding at 1 am to catch a 4 am train. Finalizing hotels just a day before. Things like these got me hooked. I visited seven cities this year, including my first international trip to Dubai. Coincidentally I visited Dubai twice this year, first with my family and then in a company outing.

Leadership/Responsibility

My company decided to promote me to a senior position in March this year. It was huge. For me, leadership had always been synonymous with responsibility. But I had never experienced the same in real life. It taught me a lot of things, technically and other dimensions of being a leader. I was now in a mentoring position. My decisions not only affected me but my team. Helping others and ensuring everyone else is unblocked to complete their work. I also learned a crucial lesson “To get things done and that too in time.”

Another thing was seeing things from a uber high level and the ability to make mental models fast. And all these things, for sure takes a lot out of you. But I had the best colleagues to guide me at each step. Special Shoutout to Bipul Jain

Health and Fitness

Before the latter half of this year, I had never paid much attention to my health and fitness. I would often go swimming, gymming or walking but nothing too serious. But then around September realized this is not sustainable, I could feel myself getting more and more lethargic. Around the same time, I saw a video of Virat Kohli, who was so passionate about his health and diet. That was my trigger I did a complete 360 turn of my habits. I started hitting the gym regularly, playing basketball.

I began to cook my food, allowing me to take care of my nutrition. I started eating healthy, included green vegetables into my diet. This overall affected me a lot. Now, my energy levels are higher. I can concentrate better.

I would suggest everyone to think about their health. BTW I am entering 2020 with sore leg muscles.

Technical

Technical things that I learned can be a separate blog post altogether. I would try to keep this as short as possible here. I realized my opinions were too set in stone to let me learn new technologies. So I got out of my comfort zone and learned frontend. I learned ReactJS and loved its ecosystem. Created a library on NPM, developed 2 of my side project, started blogging here @medium. I made my first contribution to Node. Got google scholarship for mobile web specialist and even managed to get Google certificate for the same. We also won an internal hackathon. I got interested in system design then from there into microservices and distributed systems. Maybe I will write a separate blog, having more and a detailed explanation of each 😂

Reading

Although I planned on reading a book every month, I read five books. I know it is too less, but in my defense, some were thick and heavy(to grasp). E.g., microservices, data-driven applications. So reading less is fine until I am able to grasp everything. Better be slow than irresponsible 😛

2020 Plans

Travel More

I want to travel more in 2020. I have plans to visit all the cities around Mumbai. Explore more hill stations in the Himalayas. Mostly it is about taking out the time and let yourself enjoy the moment.

Concentrate/Focus

One place where I still find myself lacking is to focus for longer periods. I easily get distracted by things happening around me and losing my focus. I will make constant effort to sit for longer periods. Decrease my mobile screen time. Focus on one task at a time, not filling my plate with everything, and then gasping to complete everything.

Read More

Every year I guess everyone has this in their bucket list. If there is a time crunch, reading-time takes the worst hit. I feel if I can get more disciplined with time and I can squeeze more time for reading. Also, keeping a constant track of books I want to read will motivate me to read more. My target would be 15 books.

Technical

Technically I would like to improve the side projects that I have been building. Now I know ReactJS so I can finally cross out my long-standing wish of having a personal website. Look out for it guys :p. One of the most challenging tasks in the Software field is to give an estimate. I want to be better at it. Also better at prioritizing the tasks. And maybe try my hand at Rust. And at last writing more blogs!

I would be able to complete these 2020 goals and put my best foot forward. If you believe in yourself, you can achieve any goals.

Wishing you guys a Happy New Year 2020, have a wonderful year. May all of you achieve all your dreams and this year brings you all the happiness.

Npm Package — https://www.npmjs.com/package/socks5-stream

Basic React TodoList — https://github.com/nimit95/React-todo

MWS Certificate — https://github.com/nimit95/Mobile-web-specialist-certificate