You’re not alone (2019, year in review)
Code, books, remote work, community, getting robbed, down-scaling, failures, wins and more…
You’re not alone!
If I have to pick only one learning from 2019, that would be “You’re not alone”
Whether it’s about the bug in your code or the fear of stage. You’re not alone.
Whether you feel confused about career choices or dealing with breakup; you are not alone.
There are people out there who have gone through same experiences as yours.
There are people who want to solve the same problems as you.
There are people who are looking for answers to the same questions as you.
There are people who know something that you don’t.
More than you think
Before I share the complete review of my year 2019, let me thank all the amazing people I met. Without you, I would have missed on many achievements or learning. A big thank you.
Who am I
$ whoami I am Pradeep. I live in India. I turned 28 in 2019.
My day job is to manage Invide, an invite-only community of developers. I promote remote work & inclusion 24*7.
I’m a “nice guy”
This review is personal and brutally honest. Forgive me for my biases.
Where I worked from
From home-office and co-working space, cafes and little bit from the trains
Places I lived/traveled
This year, I witnessed sunrise at 9 places(in India) and have fallen in love with the idea of seeing more sunrises. Some places I went only for traveling but liked so much that stayed more and worked from there(Pondicherry, Shimla). Most time was spent in Bengaluru and Sikar. The complete list :
- Bengaluru
- Pondicherry
- Kerala
- Kanyakumari
- Jaipur
- Sikar
- Gurgaon
- Shimla
- Patna
Books I read
Ones that I would recommend to every entrepreneur & developer
- Hard thing about hard things
Brutally honest anecdotes of running startup and management lessons - Startup Sutra
Entrepreneurial lessons from journey of Founder of Eko, Abhishek Sinha - GTD — Getting Things Done
- Emotional Intelligence 2.0
- Predictably Irrational
Software I built
1. Altmen — a matchmaking algorithm based on skills and personality (public beta)
2. Meet Inviders — a chrome extension to meet curated remote developers in new tab(private alpha)
3. Productivity calendar(public)
What I wrote
I could not achieve my yearly goal of writing book on Building Winning Tech Team. I have decided to pursue it after gathering more perspectives(I’m experimenting on a hypothesis that looks promising)
Nonetheless, I did write some useful detailed blog posts
- Developer career guide — 21 ways for devs to grow(5000+ words)
- Internet and 27 club, about internet history and it’s unseen impact
- List of companies hiring remotely from India
- ISA — Income Share Agreement model for educational organizations
Skills I learned/improved
- Tech :
Mongodb, Algorithms(EA,Graph, Search),
Javascript
I learned the most when I helped others - Human Behavioral Biology
An insightful and addictive course, I have become a fan of Prof. Joel Spolsky - Communication, Coordination, Collaboration, Speaking, Writing
Practice, practice and then practice more - Research
Being productive in research does not happen by chance
Movies I watched
And will recommend you to watch
- Dead poets society
A thought provoking movie about authenticity and conformity - Contact
An inspirational movie about space, tech and passion - Matrix
A movie about computer that questions the idea of reality - Lagaan
One of the best Bollywood movie - Man from Earth
- Eternal Sunshine
Chaos and big changes
- Got robbed
Imagine living with no phone, no internet. Initially, it affected all the important plans which stressed me but thanks to a friend, I got another phone.
Later on I adopted this in life, I lived without phone for weeks and had a real minimal use in last 6 months. It helped with more self-awareness and mindfulness, which was my key resolution for the year as I had noted down here at the start of this year.
- Email communications halted
After 1st quarter of ’19, our(Invide) emails started ending up in spam folder. After endless investigations of months, switching email providers, help by friends and recipients, reviewing content, we may have fixed it. Not sure.
- Down-scaling Invide project
From a team of 7, down-scaled to a team of 1. The trigger was external(a team member leaving) but found it to be the right approach at the moment. This slowed things down, forced to re-evaluate the processes and left no other choice than to scale by innovation in engineering. The hardest decision of the year. Fruitful or not, time will tell.
What I’m most proud of
Organizing Git Commit Show was a very special moment for me.
It was the biggest experiment(in the world till now) to organize a completely online developer conference (2-day long).
With the limited resources, it seemed impossible task but thanks to the help by many awesome people, we did it.
Miscellaneous
- First time, followed the concept of quarterly planning consistently
- Attended toastmasters meetings for the first time
- Successfully embarrassed myself by delivering some impromptu speeches :)
- Doubled down my research about future of work, industry, software engineering, communities, open source, non-profit and career
- Replaced weight-training with running
- Helped many people in online tech & startup community
- Wrote 100s of appreciation emails to people who contribute to the tech community
Thank you for reading so far. At the end, I would like to say
If you’re going through a rough patch or see no solution to the challenge at hand or you’re looking to solve a big problem for many people out there and create impact.
Remember…
You’re not alone!
And don’t be shy in asking for help or helping others.
Feel free to reach me out on twitter and tell me how I may help you?
