Tuesday, January 1, 2013

2012 - A year in review

2012 was such a wonderful year for me with lots of peaks and valleys that I thought I'd take some time aside and attempt to document it.

  1. The first month of 2012 started in a different way. I had spent my New Year's eve traveling to St.Marie Islands, Malpe (also known as coconut islands). It was an unplanned but awesome trip.

    After a week, we had a team outing organised by Nirvana Nomads, to Ramnagara (The location where the hindi movie - sholay was shot). I experienced kayaking, rappelling and rock climbing for the first time in my life. It was awesome!

  2. This was a month of events. I attended Barcamp Bangalore XI and JSFoo (Chennai). I had also made a poster for Barcamp as a part of mashup contest and my entry was selected which encouraged me to design a wallpaper for internal use at Kuliza.

    Then I met Richik and Garima of PoshVine to discuss about a platform they were planning to build. I loved the concept and the passion they had on that product.

  3. This month I tried my hands on music and meetups. I joined Nathaniel Methods - a basic piano course at Nathaniel School of Music. I also bought my first midi controller:

    Apart from this, I got a chance to help Payal and Kaushal conduct their first splash event at Hippo Campus, Koramangala. I met Anubha, a blogger from Mumbai who occasionally conducts workshops on crafts.

  4. April was a month of my "first" experiences. I had cooked an omelet for the first time and experienced earth quake (with no co-relation between the two).

    My first interview was published on Society Tea's blog and I gave my first talk at HasGeek's Meta Refresh event on "scalable frontend architecture".

    This month I met my IITB friends, Rahul and Richa. Unfortunately, Sharjeel and Vidya met with accident the same day (didn't have major injuries though).

  5. May brought forth few interesting twists and turns in my life. My friend had referred me to ThoughtWorks and I got selected after a 1 day long interview. I was happy to get an offer but had to decline and chose to join a startup(Hachi) instead.

  6. I quit Kuliza. The folks at kuliza gave me a nice farewell party and Anindya gifted me a T-shirt featuring myself as the UI Superhero!

    Then I spent some time working with the folks at PoshVine and helped them build the experiences platform before joining Hachi. I wasn't entirely happy with the result but that was all I could do in such a short notice.

  7. This month was both stressful and rewarding at the same time. At Hachi, I worked on a feature called Get Introduced. It was for the first time that I developed something end-to-end, inception to deployment. The work was really challenging and though I liked each and every moment of it, I couldn't handle it. I had to bid farewell and choose a different career option which is when I contacted ThoughtWorks again. May be, I'm not a startup material or I should have waited for some more time.

  8. I joined ThoughtWorks and the very first day I had to fly to Chennai to complete the joining formalities. I wasn't assigned any project in the beginning and was supposed to shadow(work along with) a senior consultant for first few days. I learnt a lot during this time. Then there was immersion. We were made to discuss, draw and play with Lego bricks to understand Agile and ThoughtWorks' way of working. 3 days of absolute fun!.

    Fortunately, I could squeeze in some time to attend Yahoo Open Hack this month. I met Mayank Singhal and Saket Chaudhary there. We couldn't build any really useful hack but ended up playing fooseball :)


  9. This month was a musical month for me. It started with our batch's graduation performance at bFlat, Indiranagar. I played the keyboards for 4 songs. It was my first such performance and I loved it. Jason(my piano teacher) picked 3 performances and chose to record them at his studio and fortunately, 1 song where I played the keyboards also got selected. It was a Lemon Tree cover.

    The month ended with an awesome trip to Goa for ThoughtWorks India's Away Day. Rose wrote a detailed description of this in her blog.
  10. October was fun. It started with a Karaoke party at Kaushal's place followed by celebrating Anand's birthday.

    Then we went on a long drive to the airport. Sid(Kaushal's kid) was still awake all the time.

    There was this music festival called october fest at Jayamahal Palace. I went for day 1 and watched Allegro Fudge, Lagori, Shaair n func and Soulmate perform. I loved Lagori and Soulmate.

    In the mid of October, we got our tiny startup called 88 Cordials, incorporated. We are still working on an idea and might be able to release our first product by March 2013.

    I celebrated my birthday this time at Hyderabad. Once at my sister's place and again at Devesh's place.

  11. I attended a relative's wedding. Everything was fine except the part where old people started asking me when I'd get married. Dunno why these people are obsessed about marriages.

    Then I spent a day visiting an orphanage and burning crackers for Diwali with my niece.

  12. December was a festive month. I also got back to blogging by starting my personal advent calendar.

    I attended NH7 Weekender music festival (wrote about it here)

    I celebrated Christmas at Hyderabad, met one of my best friends after a long time and had a picnic with family and church kids.


Resolutions

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because I always fail to meet them. Coming to my screen resolution, it is still the same old 1680 x 1050 pixels this year as well. And musically, it is dominant 7th to the tonic :p