My year in review - 2019🌻 || Started Writing Articles, Travelled the country, and Contributing to open-source🎉
Tags: yearinreview, mentalhealth, career, opensource
Published: 2019-12-31 20:52:50

*I'm just writing my heart out in this article, sorry if this gets boring or lengthy but it is for me to remind myself the things I did this year :)*

Hi, I am Saurabh (pronounced as SAW-rub). 2019 was the worst and best year at the same time and I don't know how to express but you get it right? Professionally and Emotionally I had hit my lowest and highest. 2019 was a roller coaster! 

Moving further in this article I will headline the important events, some of them went well some of them didn't work out but they are part of my 2019 and they did end up teaching me something.

# January - March
## Google Summer of Code

So I started 2019 by preparing for the [GSoC](https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline), 

> The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program, first held from May to August 2005,[1] in which Google awards stipends, which depends on the purchasing power parity of the country the student's university belongs to,[2] to all students who successfully complete a requested free and open-source software coding project during the summer. The program is open to university students aged 18 or over.
> 
>  -- <cite>[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code)</cite>

I've always been more into the maintaining and creating side of the open-source and less into contributing and I was scared of pushing a wrong code or doing something dumb to the repository but I finally decided to break this anxiety by participating in Google Summer of Code. 

I started contributing to an organization that I liked and made a small PR (3 lines of code to check the validation of a form field) and IT WAS MERGED! I was extremely happy as it was my first PR into someone else's repository.

the results were announced in April and I couldn't make it through and I was sad but I think it's ok to be sad and the whole experience of writing the application was extremely helpful for me to get started with the open-source.


## Built website for the College Technical Fest!
Every year our college arranges a technical festival called Avalon. I was part of the web team in Avalon 2018 as well and in 2019 I was the head of Creativity Team (WEB) and building a website was all up to me.

I always loved developing portfolio sort of websites. They let you go out of the box and there isn't any "standard" way for these websites.

For Avalon 2019, our theme was about Mars Exploration so I decided to build something totally out of the world (hehe). 

Here's how that website looked like:
![Screen record of Avalon website](https://res.cloudinary.com/saurabhdaware/image/upload/v1552768003/saurabhdaware.in/projects/avalon-portfolio.gif)

I used ThreeJS to build mars, its moons, and the sun! and you could move it with your mouse/touch.

![GIF of Avalon 2019 ](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/cjkf6har6c635c69ni0z.gif)

The code behind the rocket is the piece of code that I am most proud of. I change the bottom and right values on the scroll event and there's some trigonometry to make it move that way.


## Travelling to Bangalore for Hackathon

We are a team of 4 people and we usually apply to a lot of hackathons and so we applied to a hackathon in Bangalore and we were shortlisted for the offline round! we traveled from Mumbai to Bangalore and it was the first time for me to travel to a different state for a hackathon and also the first time in Bangalore.

*Fun Fact: [Bangalore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangalore) is sometimes referred to as a "Silicon Valley of India"*

![Bangalore image](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/hzzbfa1p7rvs2qppl7cw.jpeg)

![Bangalore image](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/v2t89jjpsmwrwznwaikl.jpeg)

It was an RPA hackathon and we were told to build a bot that performs some actions like, reading price of the products and applying some filters on an E-commerce website. We didn't win this either but it was a fun experience to go out with friends.


# March - August

These 6 months, was the most difficult time I ever faced in my life. I couldn't do much during this and was not very stable emotionally. I usually try to avoid coding when I am not feeling my best.

![saurabhdaware contribution graph from github](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ozag0ujzv7ckzpafz6uf.jpeg)

After June I started coding actively but it was only because I had to. After June things got worse, to be honest.

## A Blockchain hackathon in Hyderabad.
In June, we were selected in another hackathon which was in Hyderabad. Even though I was not at my best (probably I was at my worst) I went for the hackathon and liked those few days. 

We built a Smart Contract application to sell properties without paperwork (sort of like an Amazon for buying a house)

<img src=https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/7pck5oljp4tluv04r8x2.jpeg>

<img src=https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/h89sjdvo6t61lwt1micg.jpeg width=350>


# August - December

August was all about recovery🌻 I went on solo dates, started reading a book (The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow), and started appreciating people I have around.

Appreciating people helped me a lot to get back that positivity I had lost in the last few months. (I can literally write a whole separate article on how appreciating other people help me.)

<img width=350   src=https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/w9t357602h9596uekmpj.jpeg>
I went to college and the college was closed so I just started roaming around my college and found this place.

<img width=350   src=https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ngbvmv09ojvj1pv30mkt.jpeg>

## Started writing on DEV

AANDDD FINALLY I did the best possible thing!! wrote an article!!! on DEV!!!! yaaaay!! it was one of the best decisions of my life!! 
{% post https://dev.to/saurabhdaware/turn-existing-website-to-pwa-in-1-minute-using-pwainit-8do %}
I was not really sure if I was ready but I simply wrote about the thing that I made and had zero expectations from the article and surprisingly it got 65 REACTIONS! this was (and still is) a huge number for me.

The best part about DEV is the people. The community is soo positive and has always been super supportive with whatever I wrote.



## Hackathon in Pune
This time we finally won! not the first prize though we were runner ups still it was very special. We finally had a trophy in our hands. We built an automated plagiarism checker to check the plagiarized content from technical papers and reply to the user accordingly.

## Trip with family to Gujarat
We trekked to the highest mountain in Gujarat, Girnar hill which is 1031m tall. It was one of the best experiences of my life! 

<img width=400 alt=Gujarat picture from girnar hills src=https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/gkkeiq67j33lf15hp7qn.jpeg>
<img width=400 alt=Picture from girnar hills src=https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/1xuc7bm7y59x3vrd5f2a.jpeg>
<img width=400 alt=Picture of orange skies in gujarat src=https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/gkeuen0jlgslrz933e5q.jpeg>


## Hacktoberfest

AND THEN ANOTHER BIG MONTH! OCTOBER! finally time for Hacktberfest! I was extremely excited about the Hacktoberfest. I was now comfortable with the contributions part still I never had any major contributions on GitHub.

I decided to break this and make some meaningful contributions and finally ended up contributing to DEV.to, React, Prompts, Tomorrow App.

Writing a color preview feature for DEV was my favorite contribution.

This is how I prototyped the idea to Jess 😂😭😭
{% github https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/issues/4106#issuecomment-536584845 %}

Here's the pull request:
{% github https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/pull/4212 %}

So I finished my Hackatoberfest successfully🎉

Also, received my tee and stickers of Hacktoberfest!
P.S. I ordered the wrong size t-shirt so now my whole body fits into that t-shirt😂😭 I still love it!

## Job Interview
I usually apply to a lot of companies and very few replies and one of the companies that I always wanted join replied and asked me to send a resume. I did and they selected my resume and I cleared the next few rounds as well then there was an interview with the head developer and it was the BEST INTERVIEW OF MY WHOLE LIFE! She gave a very fair chance to prove myself and we had a discussion about building a snake game. It was a super cool conversation and I did not feel scared or uncomfortable even for a bit. However, I was rejected later in the algorithms round. Still, this will always be the best interview I ever had. 

Sometimes it's not really about getting selected but it's that experience.

---

And if you feel sad, just remember that it's ok to be sad, It's ok if you want to cry, that's what humans do! Crying just makes you realize how important that particular thing was.

When I started my year my plan was to complete the Google Summer of Code, Get good marks and get a good job and my 2019 was literally everything but that 😂😭😭


While we want our lives to be just like we planned. Sometimes we have to appreciate this non-perfectness in life. At the start of my year, I had no idea that something like DEV existed. Writing articles was never in a plan, I built [PWAinit](https://github.com/saurabhdaware/pwainit), [ProjectMan](https://github.com/saurabhdaware/projectman), [PocketBook](https://pocketbook.cc) and a lot of other things this year which were not in a plan as well.

Now when I look back to 2019, It wasn't exactly the way I wanted but it still was pretty cool and it is something to appreciate. I am super proud of myself for getting through this year. Also, want to thank the people that I have in my life who are always there for emotional support.

Thank you and wish you all a very Happy New Year🎉🌻