/ YEAR-IN-REVIEW

Year in Review 2020

Yet another year comes to a close!

2020 has not been the best year for mankind, with the glooming presence of COVID-19. It has been a testing time for everyone, and I am grateful to have stayed safe during the pandemic. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected.

As always we must forge ahead with positivity and keep our head high, 2020 taught me a lot of things. I learned a lot of life skills and was able to widen my horizon technically as well. I collaborated, planned, shaped, built, launched, and marketed my very own large scale projects! and now I am close to graduating and would soon be stepping into my life as a professional. Traveling, cooking, hiking, coding, mentoring, and organizing filled me with tons of joy and made my year very exciting and beautiful ❤️. An overview of my year is here.

Year in Review 2020

Fig: Some places where I got featured in 2020.

January – March

  • Organized and mentored several students in Google Code-in 2019 as an admin for the Wikimedia Foundation. I helped students with understanding the code base, debugging, and in code review.
  • Trip to Paripally orphanage along with team amFOSS and donated some essential utilities, sponsored by GSoC’19 scholars of amFOSS.
  • Fixed a few crucial bugs and implemented extended features and released VideoCutTool version 0.2.
  • Hiking with friends, dining at BBQ Nation, nightlife at Varkala brought me tons of sweet memories during Vidyut 2020.
  • Received full scholarship to attend the Wikimedia Hackathon 2020 at Tirana, Albania, Europe but due to covid19 event happened virtually.

April – June

  • Scaled up VideoCutTool to perform several requests at once and now the tool is also available as the gadget in the wikimedia common.
  • Completed “Distributed Programming in Java”, a course in Coursera which was provided by the University of RICE, Texas.
  • COVID-19 is announced as a pandemic by WHO, and I got stuck in my grandparents home (Dhone) due to lockdown. Spending a lovely and productive time with morning exercises, evening chanting slokas, enhancing programming skills, online courses, playing some indoor and outdoor games with my cousins and family (badminton, carrom board and many more.. ) brought good exercise to the body and mind.
  • Started my preparation to attend the campus placement by practicing programming questions from GeeksforGeeks sudo placement 2019 and SDE problems. For my notes during preparation go through my gitbook.
  • Received Invitation to coordinate the Outreachy’21 with Wikimedia Foundation as an org-admin.

July – September

  • Published a paper on “VideoCutTool – Online Video Editor tool for Wikimedia Commons” along with Pratik Shetty (founder of VideoWiki, Mumbai, India), James Heilman (department of emergency medicine. Cranbrook, Canada), Hassan Amin (teaching assistant of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences, Helwan University, Egypt) in ICCSP 2020 conference, Chennai.
  • After hearing the ban of 59 Chinese applications in India, My friend Nishanth and I decided to start a project and continued planning and shaping our ideas. After many weeks of discussions we decided to make an Indian application replacing TikTok and started developing Flick App to the best of our abilities.
  • After a series of online interviews, Secured a job in SAP Labs for the Associate Developer role, Bangalore. For my Interview experience go through my gitbook.
  • Trip to Kasapuram Hanuman temple and Mangampeta waterfalls with my parents and relatives after the lockdown.
  • On Sep 30th, I turned 21 and the day was so special, I enjoyed it with my friends and had a blast.

October – December

  • Released the initial version of Flick in the Google PlayStore branding Aviato.
  • Started development to release VideoCutTool to support localisation and internationalisation and planning to release another version of the tool very soon!
  • Organising, supporting and coordinating Outreachy 21 with Wikimedia and had a Welcome call with our new Interns.
  • Done with my S7 semester examinations and stepping into S8 the final one \o/
  • Long vacation to Hyderabad with my chubby mates, driving, cooking, sightseeing, and nightlife brought glory to the trip.

Working on open source and building projects, research papers and completing my academics within an year was simply amazing for me. Now that it’s the end of year 2020, Thanks to my mentor Vipin Pavithran for supporting me in all the tough times, I wish to continue with the same spirit in upcoming years and hoping that 2021 will bring us a lot more happiness and joy. Merry Christmas 🤶🌲 and Happy New Year 2021 ☃️ !!