tl;dr, Typical end of the year post as you may expect.

Well, 2018 was a significantly productive year for me compared to other years, learned so many things which I wanted to, plus added more things to the bucket list for the coming year. And you know what I am only going to talk about those in this post.

Let me draw a timeline of the events happened this year:

  • January :
    • Installed Gentoo, finally, something I wanted to do after installing Arch but never got the confidence.
    • Started out cook, a build system for me cause I could not get CMake.
  • February :
    • My first open source contribution, a small patch for Krita.
    • Was working on another patch, sadly never completed it, hush.
  • March :
    • Another open source contribution this time for Inkscape, ohh yeahh.
    • Took a session on Portage Package Manager in IIITD, first technical speaking experience, was tough, missed many points, no one cares now. 😛
    • Raspberry Pi Jam, how can I miss it, the first time I tried my hands on any single board computer.
  • April :
    • Attended my first hackathon, fortunately, we never made past the initial pitch.
    • Can use cook for my projects, my first project which made it to the usable stage.
    • Installed LFS, you read that right, Linux From Scratch, though didn’t use it for more than a week.
  • May :
    • Started working on fixture, got tired of running a virtual machine for Photoshop.
    • An attempt to automate drawing posters for ILUGD, splatter, sadly, now when I think of it, I don’t remember the last time I worked on it.
  • June :
    • Got my domain, set up my mail, all the credit goes to Github to offer me those.
    • Wrote a Lua script for doing the marvel intro in BlackMagic Design Fusion, something which opened a brand new domain for exploring to me.
    • Redid my website and set up the current blog using hugo.
    • My first patch for the flag module of Golang got merged, was only a doc patch nevertheless.
    • Started working on a rasterizer, fragment.
  • July :
    • Was working on fixture, apart from that, Qt Forums was quite nicer than StackOverflow.
  • August :
    • As always I added another project, this time it was a ray tracer, coo, but recently I just dumped it and archived the repo, writing a ray tracer in c was not my cup of tea.
    • Started learning CMake, finally, that scripting language is pretty ugly, but well CMake made my life a lot easier than thought.
  • September :
    • Round Robin-ing my projects, academics suck, such a lame month, I had.
    • One year at India Linux Users Group - Delhi, wow.
  • October :
    • PyCon India, my first ever conference, which I attended as a volunteer, hesitated at first, but, now I am not going to miss any conference which I can afford to go.
    • That feeling when you sculpt someone else’s project, like your own, thanks to dexer.
    • Mozilla, here comes my first patch for you.
  • November :
    • Multiple docs patches into Golang, which are, ermm, still not accepted, looks like my Pull Requests got lost in the heap, hope someone merges them.
    • Tired of c, decided to write another ray tracer using c++ now, frey, unfinished, but has tests and docs, what more does someone want, 😝
    • Bought a Raspberry Pi, yeah, finally, saved enough.
  • December :
    • Redid that marvel script for Nuke, this time in Python, with more features.
    • Built my own image for the Raspberry Pi, thanks to BuildRoot to make this as easy as shopping on amazon.

Summarizing

  • College sucks, the month which was the most productive had zero days of college.
  • I have a lot of unfinished projects which I need to finish quickly before starting any more.

What did I learn?

  • Can take a wild guess at the dimensions of Linux.
  • Test-driven development is a nice approach, which prevents a lot of headaches.
  • Interact more, unless you interact, you will be as idiot as you were yesterday.
  • Pulling stunts is necessary, only after coming down, I realized what I did inside Adobe.*
*Only people who know me, will get this, 😉

The List 😆

  • Complete both the rasterizer and the ray tracer.
  • Learn Nuke, more aptly its Python API.
  • Save enough for a 7” touchscreen for Pi.
  • Do more patches for upstream projects.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, :wq for now.