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A Look Back At 2016

··1188 words·6 mins
Life throwback year in review
Table of Contents

It’s been few years since I wrote my year in review, figured it’d be good to summarise what’s happened in the past year

  • Started the New Year with a road trip to Mangalore for a wedding in the family
  • Travels. Lots of travels. Jo & I wanted to do at least one place a month and had an elaborate plan complete with a Trello board and all, but towards the later part of the year, we got a bit busy and couldn’t do it. That said, here’s where we went:
  • Played and completed quite a bit of games(at least up from last years' count). Full gaming report over here.
  • I iz now over 30 unkil. Jo gifted me a Montra Trance Pro. While I didn’t bike as much as I wanted to, I’m still quite pleased with the progress - biked over 200km since acquiring the cycle. Huge props to Prashanth for encouraging me to do longer and more frequent rides.
  • Switched back to the Nexus with the purchase of Nexus 6p. My previous phone, the Xiaomi Mi 3 fell down when I was cycling and half the display was completely shattered
  • Glorious meetups with Reetesh, Mike and the exile Chip gang. Not just once, but twice! Had some great fun at the expense of others..
  • Managed to attend most of the Dev Up monthly meets. It’s pretty great to talk to these guys(and gals) - you get to learn so many things!
  • One of the most defining moments of the year: quit my job as PL/SQL dev after a 5 year stint at CGI and joined Styletag, thereby switching my volunteer work elsewhere to my professional day job. The first few weeks were hard, the learning curve pretty steep but it’s been a pretty great transition with lots of things learnt and to learn. Huge thanks to Saurabh for nudging me to move in this space and to Ninad for helping out in many ways 🙂
  • Side project updates
    • spotify_dl got a little bit more phamous since I had posted it couple of times on Reddit. Happy to have received some nice contribs from the community
    • TumiBot: Wrote a small Telegram bot which replies with ‘catch phrases’ at random times. Named it as Tumibot since the bot was originally supposed to say only “Tumi” & “Reach De”
    • Got a little sticker pack from Chef for a small documentation update PR that got merged.
    • Ditched about.me and switched to Github pages for a small “About Me” page
  • Also got to partner with BeMyApp for couple of cool projects:
    • Wrote a bunch of articles which were published on the SAP Developer Network
    • Organized, ran and MC’d an internal hackathon for a fairly large bank. Had a good time and great learning experience with how BMA organizes things!
  • Mumbai visit for IGX. While IGX itself was pretty meh, had an awesome time being with Mix, Slacker, Jay, Kush.
  • Realised how far Android phones have come, esp when I was forced to use a S3(a flagship at one time!) since my Nexus 6p conked off out of nowhere when in Pune. Managed to get a motherboard replacement for the phone for free.
  • Welcomed the new year being at home with Aman over, playing some games and watching Reservoir Dogs.

Some obvious and not-so-obvious gadgets/other things bought during the year #

  • Google Nexus 5X: Gave to Jo
  • Google Nexus 6P: This replaced my Mi3. Camera’s to die for. Taken some incredibly awesome pictures. Still haven’t quite gotten used to it’s size, but overall very happy with the phone.
  • Spigen Magnetic Air vent mount: Bought this to mount my 6p(thanks to Jay for the recommendation). These are incredibly awesome to have, no need to have something jutting down from the windscreen. Bonus sideeffect: Your phone remains cool because it’s right on the AC vent.
  • Brainwavz Hengja: Slick hanger for your headphones, especially if you have large/heavy ones. Priced at Rs ₹1000, people have asked me if I am nuts to buy these, but considering how much less clutter is there on the desk and that it is a metal hanger(and not flimsy plastic one) with excellent build quality, it’s worth buying.
  • Bitfenix Spectre case fan: I’m slowly replacing all case fans with these. They’re pretty silent, get the job done and just worth it!
  • MiBand 2: This was meant to be a stop-gap fitness band/HRM/pseudo-smart watch till my Pebble Time 2 was supposed to arrive, but with Fitbit acquiring Pebble’s software, the hardware’s dead.. so stuck with this.
  • Logitech Z506 5.1 surround speakers: Bought these during a lightning sale. Pretty happy with the performance. Had to go for a replacement since the first order was DOA due to Amazon’s poor handling during shipping.
  • Meizu EP-51 bluetooth speakers: The most recent purchase, bought after listening to Abhijoy’s device and was impressed with the quality.
  • Garmin Virb: Bought a refurbished Garmin Virb along with Prashanth. I haven’t used it much yet, once the road trips start I hope to get some good footage 🙂
  • Montra Trance Pro: Birthday gift from wifey. Slightly over 200km clocked on this one, hope to do more this year.
  • Activa-i: Yeah, actually went ahead and bought a two-wheeler after not riding one for well over 15  years. With the office near MG Road, taking car and finding parking is really difficult and prompted me to switch to this.

What’s for 2017? #

I don’t have any resolutions as such for 2017, but there are some things that I hope to accomplish:

  • Cycle more. I have been guilty of having the cycle stashed away far more than I wanted to, want to avoid this and go riding more
  • Travel more. Jo and me didn’t hit our one-place-per-month target, hope to do it this year.
  • NE/Sikkim/Bhutan visit. Another one which has been in the pipeline for a while. Hope to achieve this
  • Hardware upgrades. Another set of things I have been wanting to have since a while
    • Decent (mech|RGB) keyboard
    • Move away from my 1080p, Dell UltraSharp 24″ to a 27″ 4K + another smaller screen. Preferably mounted on a VESA mount
  • Finish more games. I’m looking forward to Mass Effect: Andromeda, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Persona 5 release, with these and the other games that I have in my backlog, I think I should be covered for the year.

Compilation of Year in 2016 #

Quite a few of the services that I use had sent their Year in 2016 compilations to me, here’s most of them in one place + archived just in case.

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Strava

 

Well that’s that for 2016. Happy New Year and here’s hoping for a great 2016!

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