2019: A roller coaster ride
One more 31st December and for the last time of the year wondering what happened to my dreams, fucked up life and fun/loving activities.
I started this year with a bang, winning the first-ever hackathon in my Carwale.com. Winning it was pure joy, 3 freshers coding all day and night, created a tool which solved a major problem. Certainly was the dope start to 2019.
While I was happy winning the hackathon, my good friend was leaving the company which left me with the thought of where I am going with my goals. My major goals of 2019 were to get into one of my dream companies, getting better physical health, become super strong at the backend.
But I was enjoying my work too. I started taking more responsibility in the team, got better at designing, code review. Worked on the fancy frameworks(react), forced unit tests, code quality in my team. I started becoming a strong contributor and technical pillar of my team.
While I was at the peak of doing all these, my Product Manager, Tech Manager, 2 senior engineers left team and company. Life got worse. I had to face poorly managed product delivery, onboard 4 inexperienced members in the team. Work-life wasn't going as per I wanted and last quarter turned out to be the worse experience I had in the company.
I was also contributing to an open-source project, it was challenging and exciting. Managing it was becoming hectic, I was too reluctant to stop it. But I had to. It wasn’t fun anymore, my full-time job was demanding, I had to prepare for interviews, learn computer science fundamentals(I am Mech Graduate) and clearly it wasn't aligning to my future plans.
Meanwhile, as my goal was to get into one of my dream companies, none of them gave me interviews. Google didn't like me, Uber didn't have openings, Soundcloud, Spotify, Monzo, Yelp were not looking for a candidate like me. But, I was fortunate enough I got a chance to interview at some of the top tech companies like Databricks, Grab, Zalando, Gojek. Though I wasn't able to get into them but certainly facing interviews with these companies gave me a chance to network and a broader scope to improve.
The job hunt didn't end badly. I landed up with 3 job offers. Luckily I got Hyderabad location of Amazon. Now I am an FAANG engineer :P.
It wasn't a bad year for personal activities. I become good at Table Tennis, went to 3 treks, one of which was Maharashtra's highest point. Started running (2km), push-ups (even reached a level of 3 sets of 20 but wasn't able to continue it).
2019 also hit me hard when my father got hospitalized. It was a crushing event for me and family but finally, we were able to recover from it. Now things are stable and it made us stronger, confident.
I am saying bye to 2019, a year of happy, crushing and adventurous events. A year when many times I slept dissatisfied while many times I wasn't able to sleep because of excitement. A year that taught me many skills and gave a more matured mindset but yet leaving me confused and hungry.
Thanks for reading and Happy New Year.
