2021, year in review
Tags: review, opensource, django
Published: 2022-01-30 16:28:52

---
title: 2021, year in review
published: true
date: 2022-01-30 10:00:00 UTC
tags: review, opensource, django
canonical_url: https://sarahabd.com/blog/2021-year-in-review/
---

Hi there, it's have been a while... First of all, I want to say happy new year to you, best wishes !! 

Thank you to [Katherine Michel](https://github.com/KatherineMichel) and [Dawn Wages](https://github.com/dawnwages) for inspiring me to do a Year in Review blog post!

### TL;DR

This year wasn't my best year but I success to do things I can't imagine do. 

My highlights for the year have been: 

- Attending to DjangoCon Europe and US
- Do a lightning talk
- Pass Hacktoberfest challenge
- Make a contribution to a huge project
- Discover and be part of an amazing community

### Learning and improvements

I learn a lot this year, by trying things, reading, and do mistakes of course. I read [the book of Adams Johnson about testing](https://adamchainz.gumroad.com/l/suydt), which is really interesting. I discovered I had to change some habits and improve some projects. 

I'm trying to be more involved in things which I care about or I have an interest in, for example, testing or Open Source Software.

I also learn by interacting with people, even though I still have some difficulty understanding everything in English since I am not fluent but close too!

I discovered many things in 2021, there are so many resources : newsletter, podcast, twitter accounts (yeah really), let me list some of them :

- [Django Girls podcast](https://anchor.fm/djangogirls)
- [Pycoder’s weekly](https://pycoders.com/)
- [Trey hunner](https://twitter.com/treyhunner?t=iMH0ONBeIKZmXz2zgiRzkQ&s=09) twitter account
- Adams Johnson [books](https://adamj.eu/books/) and [blog](https://adamj.eu/tech/)
- ...

And conferences, even for past years are really interesting. I definitely recommend you to check out!

I also discovered I can inspire others, even I don't think I did something amazing as other great people of the dev world but you can inspire even on things that don't seem huge. 

### Conferences

I have attend to my first conference, DjangoCon Europe, and gave my first lighting talk ! I have wrote a post [here](https://sarahabd.com/blog/djangocon-europe-2021-thoughts/), I hope I will have a chance to attend to the next one. And in real life, so many amazing people have told me that it's a different experience and I really want to see that and see the people I talk to, so many times in the virtual haha. 

I also attend to DjangoCon US, it was very nice but I didn't attend so long due to hours. I wanted to help the organizers but I didn't have time to do so. If you want to contribute to the community, this is a way to do it. Many people think, it's all about code, but there are so many things to do besides coding for contribution. 

I hope I will be able to do more meetups and exchange with people (in real life would be even better!).

### Hacktoberfest as maintainer

I have done hacktoberfest for the second time, but this time I was contributor and also maintainer, thanks to [Fum](https://github.com/funbeedev). This is a great experience, even I didn't imagine how it can be exhausting. As a contributor you want things to happen quickly, but as a maintainer, it’s nice to see the engagement of people but so many things to do and some time people answer like the project is your only life, and I can tell you: this is totally NOT the case ! 

Despite that, I have learned so many things by reviewing: see things in another way, or dig in some subject I didn't know much before.

### Individuals contributions

I guess this is my best year for contributing to open source, I contributed to many projects. From small contributions to big ones. I contributed to a big project: Django. It was amazing, I also learned while doing it. It's not an impressive contribution, but I hope it will be useful to everyone who uses this amazing framework! I hope to make more contributions, especially in the python ecosystem this new year.

### Reminder to myself

2021 I tried things I didn't think I would have done. If I have piece of advice to tell, it will be :

- Be more organized
- Try your best, if it's not perfect, that's fine
- Contribute, help, write. Sometimes you think it's stupid or useless, but it's not for someone else
- Exchange is gold. You can learn things from someone and the person can also learn from you