2019 Year in Review
Tags: yearinreview, softwareengineering, publicspeaking, blogging
Published: 2019-12-15 03:47:47

This is the first time I am writing a recap of a year after getting inspired by some amazing recaps. This post is a look back on all the professional things I did this year and a hint to what’s coming in 2020. Last year I did [5 most popular](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2018/12/2018-in-review-5-most-viewed-posts-of-this-year/) posts on my blog, this year is a look back at 2019. Let’s jump to the highlights.


## Highlights

* I was featured in a [podcast](https://www.devpath.fm/episodes/international-software-engineer-and-speaker-geshan-manandhar) as a software engineer and blogger
* My public speaking efforts were recognized by [CFP land](https://medium.com/cfp-land/speakers-story-geshan-manandhar-intercontinental-speaker-and-senior-software-engineer-9debe3dea6ab) in an interview
* This year I spoke at [4 tech conferences and 4 meetups with 4 talks](https://github.com/geshan/public-speaking), magic no 4.
* I successfully migrated my pet project [Nepal News English](https://twitter.com/nepal_news_en) to Google Cloud run written in Node Js
* Wrote 12 blog posts this year, 1 per month is not a bad average :)

## Featured

I was featured in a podcast on [devpath.fm](https://www.devpath.fm/episodes/international-software-engineer-and-speaker-geshan-manandhar) and my interview as an “[Intercontinental Speaker](https://medium.com/cfp-land/speakers-story-geshan-manandhar-intercontinental-speaker-and-senior-software-engineer-9debe3dea6ab)” was published on CFPLand. I am pretty sure this is not going to happen in 2020 so let me enjoy the little fame I earned in 2019 :).

![Featured in a Podcast and interview as a speaker](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/hwe1biee3695ten63djo.jpg)

## Public Speaking

This year I did more than 10 talks, 8 of them were public and 2+ were internal at THE ICONIC. Among the many CFPs I submitted for tech conference the following 4 were accepted and I spoke at these conferences:

* [Container Camp AU](https://2019.container.camp/au/speakers/geshan-manandhar/)
* [Serverless Days Sydney 2019](https://sydney.serverlessdays.io/speakers/geshan/)
* [Laracon AU](https://laracon.com.au/)
* [GDG Devfest Sydney 2019](https://devfest.org.au/speakers/geshan_manandhar)

I spoke about [the importance of automated testing](https://www.slideshare.net/geshan/we-lost-205k-in-one-day-and-how-we-could-have-saved-it-hint-better-automated-testing-130685136), [Microservices](https://www.slideshare.net/geshan/moving-from-a-and-b-to-150-microservices-the-journey-and-learnings), [Serverless Containers](https://www.slideshare.net/geshan/from-0-to-working-serverless-url-for-a-containerized-app-with-google-cloud-run-2) and [Logging Best Practices](https://www.slideshare.net/geshan/are-logs-a-software-engineers-best-friend-yes-follow-these-best-practices) this year.

I did a talk each quarter of the year in 2019. You can find a full timeline of all my public speaking in [this](https://github.com/geshan/public-speaking) Github repo. In terms of impact, just in 2019, I have spoken in front of ~1100 people without traveling to another city.

![Public Speaking in 2019](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/6tbh56p129ywxtlsxrdo.jpg)

## Blogging

In 2019, until now, I have written 12 blog posts. The year started with a technical topic of [debugging NodeJs applications](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-debugging-nodejs-applications-with-ndb/) and my last post at the start of December was about [getting your Pull Request (PR) merged faster](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/12/how-to-get-your-pull-request-pr-merged-quickly/). Below are the top 5 viewed posts of 2019 written in the same year:

* [Logging best practices to get the most out of application level logging – Slides](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/03/follow-these-logging-best-practices-to-get-the-most-out-of-application-level-logging-slides/)
* [Getting started with debugging nodeJs applications with ndb](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/01/getting-started-with-debugging-nodejs-applications-with-ndb/)
* [How to use docker multi-stage build to create optimal images for dev and production](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/11/how-to-use-docker-multi-stage-build/)
* [Things tech recruiters look for in your resume and the first interview](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/01/things-tech-recruiters-look-for/)
* [Set up Laravel 6 on Google Cloud Run step by step with Continuous Integration (CI)](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/10/get-laravel-6-running-on-google-cloud-run-step-by-step-with-ci/)

Almost all of my blog posts are cross-posted to [dev.to](https://dev.to/geshan) and [hackernoon](https://hackernoon.com/@geshanm). On medium. I generally post to [ITNext](https://itnext.io/@geshan) publication and this year one of my [posts](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-setup-laravel-6-on-google-cloud-run-with-continuous-integration-ci-step-by-step/) made it to FreeCodeCamp News.

I have written some posts for [THE ICONIC tech blog](https://theiconic.tech/@geshan) too, one of them about [tailing logs from Kubernetes pod](https://theiconic.tech/tail-logs-from-multiple-kubernetes-pods-the-easy-way-71401b84d7f) was the most popular post for that publication.
I don’t want to give out the exact numbers. Still, from the view counts of my blog’s google analytics, [medium](https://medium.com/@geshan), and [dev.to](https://dev.to/geshan) stats, it was over 200K views. I think I am helping the software engineer’s community quite well with my writing :).

![12 Blog posts in 2019](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/spfyyxftppa9zj45fw49.jpg)

Ok, it just happened once that I had 80 people on this blog at the same time but worth a mention :).

## Side Project

Notice that it is a side project, not multiple side projects :). I will mention the one I successfully migrated to Node js codebase and it is running on [Google Cloud Run](https://geshan.com.np/blog/categories/google-cloud-run/). The project in [Nepal News English](https://twitter.com/nepal_news_en). It was stated to scratch my own itch :). I have not lived in Nepal for almost 10 years now and I want to read Nepal’s news in one place. That’s how it was born. It started with mashing up some free online services but in 5 years they became ultra restrictive.

I took this opportunity to write a small app that parses RSS and scrapes some news sites that don’t have RSS (pity a news website without RSS). Then it uses a database to know unposted news and the one’s not posted are tweeted every X minutes. I completed this in like 2-3 weekends. The twitter bot/user has 11K followers now which is pretty good in my understanding. The code is not open source.

![Side Project -- twitter bot with 11K followers](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ekuvqsg8i8z4yh0zn57s.jpg)

## Misc

Some of the other things I am happy I did this year.

### Mentoring/helping find a tech job

I have helped at least 5 people find tech jobs here in Sydney. Most of them were Masters' students here trying to break into the tech scene but not finding it easy. Blog posts about [landing your first tech job](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2018/09/7-practical-steps-to-land-your-first-tech-job/) and [things recruiters look in your resume](https://geshan.com.np/blog/2019/01/things-tech-recruiters-look-for/) was an effort to help people in similar situations. Another thing I did was to help along the same line was to create an open-source repo that lists tech(ish) [AU companies providing work visa sponsorship](https://github.com/geshan/au-companies-providing-work-visa-sponsorship). This has helped people in Australia as well as abroad.

![AU companies providing work visa sponsorship Github Repo](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/cgbkjwiejmrfetz583fe.jpg)

### Open-source

I have not contributed much to open source this year but I did complete the Hacktoberfest in the first week. The good thing about this year is I got the swag delivered :)

![Hacktoberfest Swag - Hurray! open source](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/4ltiwwlpylddh4zmx3e0.jpg)

A quick peek on my Github stats showed [1997 commits](https://github.com/geshan?tab=overview&from=2019-12-01&to=2019-12-15) this year, which is good IMHO. Of course, most of it was for closed source projects.

### Love is in the code #couplecodes

I did a series of tweets/[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/webothcode/) posts with the imaginary conversations of couples who code in Jan-Feb 2019. It was not very popular but I think it is worth a mention here. Disclaimer: My wife does not code and this is dedicated to like 3+ couples I know where both code or used to write software. Enjoy the [conversation](https://twitter.com/i/moments/1091306088014655489) as a twitter moment.

![Couple Codes twitter moment](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/v4wsrrkdlcrqf8azk8qv.jpg)

### More twitter followers

I think I have gained close to 500 followers in [2019](https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/geshan/monthly), which is not bad. I am looking for more [twitter](https://twitter.com/geshan) followers so if you are not following me on twitter please do so :) Below is my most popular [tweet](https://twitter.com/geshan/status/1180759964316573696) of 2019:

![Most popular tweet of the year 2019](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/5rjc52ol0ffelx01z9mv.jpg)

I posted lots of interesting reads on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/geshan/) too.

## Looking ahead to 2020

I have set some goals for 2020, one of them should be met in Jan 2020 I think. You will know about it as it happens. I plan to do some public speaking in 2020 too, I have not set any targets though. I will continue to blog the frequency may vary but there will be some posts.

> Hoping for a great start of 2020.