Gopa Vasanth
2022 was a year of excitement and exploration. I got to do so many new things and experience life in a different way. Travel was a big part of this year. With the pandemic over, many restrictions were removed, allowing people to travel more freely. I was able to visit the City of Gold - Dubai and also many places in South India. I learned so much during my travels and also got to try so many delicious foods, explore different cultures, and meet new people.
Another highlight of the year was relocating to the Silicon Valley of India - Bengaluru and starting to work from the office, meeting people in person after a year of virtual meetings.
I also learned a lot this year. From developing personal skills to coding and delivering talks to a wider audience, I was able to work on my personal projects, enhance my skill set, and share my knowledge and experiences at various events and conferences. Here is a list of some key highlights of 2022:
January – March
- Organised “d-shop Home Automation mission and challenge” along with d-shop colleagues.
- Presented d-shop Inventory tool in SAP d-kom - Largest annual event for engineering and development community of SAP Labs India.
- Learned about the best practices and did SAFe DevOps Practitioner certification from SAFE Agile Inc.
- Signed up as an Organiser for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 - Wikmedia’s largest annual hackathon along with Haley and the team.
- I learned to write cookbooks to automate some boring stuff using Chef.
- Got featured on SAP Innovation Cookbook.
- Visited my friend Nishanth at Kochi and spent a couple of productive weeks brainstorming new ideas, startups and learnt flutter.
- Built WhatsApp Karo - A mobile application which sends direct WhatsApp messages to unsaved phone numbers built with Flutter and released in Google PlayStore.
- Led the training sessions for Interns in our team with the DevOps tools and technologies.
April – June
- Won the Special Jury Award at the SAP HackOverFlow 2022 - Hackathon for creating SAP Teamup - A crowdsourcing platform to collaborate, build, network, learn, unite, and enjoy!!
- Joined SAP Hive Experiments as a core committee member.
- Coordinated Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs with Wikimedia Foundation as an org-admin.
- Gifted a car - Volkswagen Jetta to my father.
- Organised local event - Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 in Hyderabad at Aditya Park Hotel, here is my experience of the meetup.
- I spent a happy 15 days with my grandparents at Dhone.
July – September
- Relocated to Bangalore and started working from the office.
- Celebrated 50 Years of SAP at BIEC, Bangalore along with the parents.
- Attended a stand-up comedy show by Manoj Prabakar at Just BLR with my friend Sreejth.
- For the first time ever, I went to the team lunch at The Creek Den in Bangalore with the SF Cloud Ops team.
- Spent a joyous day at Area 83 in Bangalore with my SF Cloud Ops colleagues.
- Organized an Indic Wikimania Hackathon in Bangalore; it was great fun to meet new and old wiki friends after a long time.
- Got invited to attend the Wiki Arabia 2022 Conference, held in Dubai by the Wikimedians of UAE and the Emirates Literature Foundation.
- Gifted Dubai gold braslate to my father and gold ring to my mother.
- Moved to the new team, CCE in Service Enablement, from the previous Bizx AppOps Automation Team, and started working with new projects and techstack.
October – December
- Delivered version 0.1 of CHALET - Centralised Change Automation Lifecycle Tool.
- Talked about the “Opportunities for the New Developers in the Wikipedia community” in the WikiArabia conference at Dubai.
- Visited the World’s largest Building - Burj Khalifa, Palm jumeirah and several other places in Dubai.
- Delivered a talk at Fosscomm 2022 on “Wikipedia 101 for New developers” - Greece conference Virtual.
- Trained the students of SVECW college Bhimavaram (Virtual) with the Open Source culture and technologies.
- Joined the scholarship committee of WikiConference India 2023 and the Wikimedia Technology Summit in Hyderabad to help review the applications.
- Took part in a design thinking workshop to curate ideas and innovations at the SAP Hive communities.
- Delivered the pilot project requirements between SF engineering and operation teams.
- Hiking and trekking on a road trip to Coorg and Wayanad with my office friends was an amazing and memorable experience.
All in all, it was a great year. I got to experience so many new things and learn something from each experience. I’m excited for what’s to come in the upcoming year and looking forward to more amazing experiences. Here’s to an adventurous 2023! Merry Christmas 🎅 and Happy New Year!!⛄️