The Memoirs from 2022

The Memoirs from 2022

- A retrospective blog on the events that sculpted me personally and professionally.

Hey everyone! Hope you all had some amazing experiences in 2022, this is a retrospective blog on how 2022 changed the way I perceived things and crafted me into a better person both personally and professionally. This is going to be a long blog... Grab a cup of coffee before you start reading.

My journey as the Logistics Lead of Hackerabad

January 6, 2022.

The day when we were about to demystify a lot of myths that students carried about the term "Hack" and share facts about what big things students can do when they are in a constructive environment. An eye-opening open session named "What The Hack?" by Hackerabad wherein we introduced folks to an amazing community that is inclusive, catalytic, and student-centric which will never ask a penny to provide opportunities to grow, network, and pursue your passion in tech. As they say, "If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way", this community started with just 8 passionate undergraduate students. No big names, no fancy titles, and no corporate companies involved. I am glad that I am part of this community and had the privilege to contribute to it as a core team member.

Learning Outcome:

I was an introvert. I was clueless about collaboration, networking, hackathons, free resources, and sharing experiences and thoughts in public. I started talking to some awesome folks, learned some awesome ways to talk in front of people, and gave my first public talk in this open session where I spoke in front of an 80-member crowd, fearless and joyful. This made me realize my potential in interacting with people and sharing ideas in public. I never left an opportunity to speak after this. I am glad about the dynamic nature of this community as it never pertained me to a specific role or position but always encouraged me to pursue my interests in other areas too. I'd love to thank Ashwin Kumar Uppala for making all this happen. I want to heartfully thank people like Kunal Kushwaha, Eddie Jaoude, Aditya Oberai, Siddharth Dayalwal, Kaiwalya Koparkar, Karuna Tata, and many such folks for developing a passion for tech communities in me and for making me achieve big things that I never thought myself capable of.

Beyond The Binary

March 17, 2022.

As a student from a tier-3 college, it can be really hard for you to find people who talk about roles that don't directly require you to write lines of code and still be able to contribute to open source and make a career out of it. It is also equally difficult to find people in your surroundings who are inclusive and accept diversity. To help students come out of these problems, we had a virtual talk show named "Beyond The Binary".

Learning Outcome:

This was an awesome opportunity for me to come out of my comfort zone, be able to co-host a session, moderate the discussions happening around it, and interact with some awesome people like Aaishika S Bhattacharya, Aditya Oberai, Vaishnavi Dwivedi, Sreekaran Srinath, Shubhangi Gupta, and Kartikey Rawat. These are a few folks whom I always admired from MLH workshops and their work in the tech community. It also taught me how to collaborate with folks out there and made me realize that to be able to deliver quality insights and knowledge, you don't need to invest anything, it's just a matter of reaching somebody out and asking for it.

ABCD (AnyBody Can Develop)

June 9, 2022.

Day 1: Professional Ethics 101, An Intro to Tech Culture.

As a student, it can be very difficult to understand how to reach out to somebody and exactly be able to put your queries in the form of sentences and choose an optimum platform to do the same. How can someone be mindful and inclusive while addressing someone? How do things work when you are working in a company? How do you build a good resume/CV/cover letter for yourself and what do companies prioritize more? Your skills? or the certificates? We have answered all these questions in this session.

Day 2: May The Source Be With You.

In this session, we made the students understand the importance of Open Source and how it is changing how companies hire, making their products and services transparent, and how you can be part of their initiatives by contributing to big projects at the ease of your home. We helped students understand Git and GitHub and got their first PR merged.

Learning Outcome:

As a student, I was always told that earning a certificate is important and it would be the only way to prove my work. But I wasn't aware that certificates cannot always make you credible. At least not in today's time as there are tons of courses that provide you certificates for some amount of money. I understood the importance of sharing my work in public, building projects, contributing to open source, and sharing my experiences in the form of blogs which will serve as testimonials for my credibility.

CodeDay Hyderabad

July 9, and November 26, 2022

"CodeDay", a 24-hour-long event where an artist, a dancer, a psychology student, and more such students from diverse fields and interests broke into tech and experienced their first Eureka moment in the field of tech. All the students were of the age group 13 to 18 years.

Learning Outcome:

This single event taught me many life lessons that I will cherish for a lifetime. It taught me how to handle rejections, it helped me put myself into the shoes of other people and understand their points of view, it built humility inside me, and it made me understand how perfect things can imperfectly go wrong if you are not planning properly. There were a ton of conflicts in opinions, hours of mental work, and a significant amount of stress while working in a dynamically changing environment. From reaching out to schools, talking to the management, and making them understand how students can benefit from such an event to making everything happen in reality, all of us were constantly on our toes. But in the end, the joyful faces and the outburst of excitement that we got to witness paid off for everything we did. I still remember a girl from grade 8, I was interacting with students during the event publicity and I was trying to establish coding as a form of expression, I enquired about how many of them danced/sang/play musical instruments or perform any kind of art. This 8th-grade student said something that I'll always cherish. She said, "Art helps in expressing emotions and thoughts in situations where words fail". That was the exact point I was trying to make... We code to bring our thoughts/emotions/ideas into reality and make something out of it. This changed the way everyone perceived coding and programming.

Fun fact: I spoke with more than 500 students during the outreach and had nostalgic emotions triggered by the benches, whiteboards, and doorways.

Happiness Program by Art Of Living

August 25, 2022.

The happiness Program by Art Of Living foundation was a 3-day course that introduced us to breathing exercises like Pranayama, Bhastrika, and Sudarshan Kriya. This was an immense experience for me as I never thought that a simple task like breathing that we perform involuntarily 24/7 has a great impact on the way we think, feel, and perceive things.

Learning Outcome:

As a student/ homemaker/ working professional, irrespective of what you do, everyone needs to spend time on themselves and need to meditate and introspect upon themselves. Everyone must realize the importance of breathing and be capable of controlling it and directing it for a greater cause. This course has given me a life-changing experience with knowledge points and scientific facts about breathing.

Hackathons and Networking Events

As a student, never pertain or limit yourselves to a single field or a single path that is followed conventionally. Always try to meet more people coming from diverse fields and gain a better understanding of them. You can meet amazing people of different levels of expertise. Networking events can provide room for some amazing conversations and dialoguing... So make sure you're going there with an open mind. I have attended some good Networking events in 2022 like GitHub Tech Tab, Microsoft's AzureDevDay Hyderabad, MLH Hackcon India, Notion Co-Building Sessions, Chainlink Web3 Meetup, and this list keeps going...You can see that I haven't limited myself to just web2/web3 meetups, but I have also attended a few no-code events to gain a broader perspective.

Take part in Hackathons during weekends MLH, WeMakeDevs host some amazing hackathons, win some amazing prizes, network with some great folks and build that rigor of working in a high-performance environment. You can also find hackathons happening around on Devpost I have personally learned a lot from Hackathons and Networking events.

Key Takeaways

Well as they say, "It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure", I have applied to a lot of student programs, couldn't get through them but, I have learned how to make constructive changes and contributed more to communities through this process. I had to compromise upon a lot of areas in life to be able to meet the bare minimum.

I have had numerous amounts of opportunities where could explore new fields. I have pushed myself hard and taken that one extra step whenever I felt I'm done. I cried, smiled, danced, met new people, learned some incredible skills, taught students, and helped them achieve things in their life. As with every year, 2022 was also a collection of emotions and in the end, everything taught me something. With this said I'd gladly welcome another great chapter of my life I.E, 2023.

Note: Would love to know your story and help me make this blog better through comments. Thank You!