My 2021 Unwrapped
Tags: beginners, career, discuss, writing
Published: 2022-01-02 19:07:33

_As we step into a new year, I am here to unwrap whatever I did in the year 2021._

2021 was an year of mixed emotions for me. From anxiety, to sadness, to little happiness, to meeting new people & making new friends, to motivations & encouragements, to learning a lot. This year has been a roller-coaster for me and has surely taught me a lot. Not only on the materialistic side, but also on the intellectual aspect.

The year started pretty well. I started learning new things. One of my goals for 2021 was to read about a new topic each day. I will say I am 40%-50% on that goal, because some days, it so happened that I read about a new topic and then following days I was digging into that particular topic itself. It surely counts as learning new thing, doesn't it?
In 2021 I enhanced my open-source journey a bit. Although I entered into the world of open-source in 2020, but it was only in 2021 that I understood the true meaning of open-source and open-culture.
I took part in different open-source programs as a volunteer, participant, and mentor. It started with [Girl Script Summer of Code](https://gssoc.girlscript.tech/). I learnt a lot more than the basic git commands here and met new people. I was able to secure a rank of 83 among 6500+ participants from across the globe. After that I was selected as a mentor for DevIncept DCP 2021 and a fellow for Script Winter of Code. I took up the role of mentor in [DevIncept DCP 2021](https://dcp.devincept.com/) and helped a lot of participants to make their first contribution to open-source. It felt great to be able to help newcomers and retain their faith in themselves that they are no less and once after getting started, they can do wonders!
I was also a part of the Open Source Day by AnitaB.org, where I made contributions to projects like Ceph and Material-UI.

Later this year, I got the chance to be a part of the SUSE Cloud Native Foundations Program by [Udacity](https://www.udacity.com/). 
I was one among the 15000 scholars selected globally to enter the SUSE Cloud Native Foundations Course workspace.
It was the most special part of the year. I met so many new people, learnt a lot, made new friends and what not.
The scholarship challenge was fun, and it indeed taught me a lot. From time-management, to cloud native fundamentals. I even got into top 5 student stories around the world which was really unexpected. 
Here we organized webinars, sessions, made study groups to accomplish our goals, encouraged and helped each other. My favorite part was organizing events, because it helped me clear my understanding on the topics even more, and eventually helped people who were stuck in that particular topic. The love and support that I received from this program and the events that we conducted was really encouraging.

One of my goals which I was able to complete in 2021 was to speak at events. I was invited to speak at several events including the Powershell, DevOps and Cloud Conference 2021, Docker Community All Hands #4, etc. More of myself in this area will be seen in 2022. 😇

Another thing about which I am happy was Hacktoberfest 2021. 
I felt beyond happy that one year ago, I was zero on git and github. I was unable to make a simple Pull Request. But this year, I was searching for more meaningful contributions to make. I felt glad that I was able to expand my learnings even if it was by just a small percentage.
I made contributions in repositories of organizations like Appwrite, Appsmith, Milvus, Mattermost, LoginRadius, etc. Some of my blogs can be found on [my Dev.to profile](https://dev.to/noviicee).

Apart from these, I enhanced my learnings in the Python Programming Language. I happened to talk to some experienced people in this field which helped my understand where I lack, and therefore I'll be working on those areas in 2022 :)
Also, one should never forget about failures as they are a part of journey. I tried to expertise in a few more skills and areas, but have not been able to do it till now. Hopefully the new year helps me in completing my incomplete tasks from the previous year :)

Further for 2022, I am planning to learn & share as much as I can with the community. I look forward to meet with more people and try to better myself. I am also planning to take out time to read and exercise, as I had been more on the lazier side in the previous year.

Well these are my small wins for 2021. The year had surely been a lot more, but these, form a major part of Anamika's 2021.

Hope that the New Year brings waves of happiness and joy to us. Happy New Year everyone! :tada: