Into the new year 2014 and some resolutions

So 2013 was kind of meh. I was into a new job and a new place and yeah I didn't have much of any agenda. Thankfully that was a good thing. The year was totally hectic, I have been travelling 5 hrs a day and on top of that working on some really messed up codebase. So a year later I can say that on personal level I may have achieved nothing, but I have done some real good work to the code I have been working on.

The year saw all my close friends go through job change. Couple of them moved to new places. Few more got married. Couple of the others already married had kids. In short life is moving ahead. My life though felt like stuck at a single point. My hectic daily schedule left no time for extra-curricular activities. I have done no new translation of anything, I have not reviewed any distros, I have stayed close to the Elementary OS installation I have and all through the year, I have updated it only thrice. The only new thing I can proudly say of is I have started Cycling. Bought an entry level Roadbike and got in the scene.

Been trying to be regular on weekends but it's become almost a fortnightly activity.

My laptops keyboard lost 3 keys; couple of them directional keys and so I had to finally stop playing NFS Most Wanted! It was no fun with remapped keys. My 3 Yr old Acer can't play any new games so I guess the broken keyboard is the nail in the coffin for my Gaming activities. I could replace the keyboard but it's not completely broken; I can still do most of coding activities (what little I do these days).

Another thing of much say is that I finally gave in to the Droid Temptation and got an entry level Android phone. Yeah, my now - 2.5Yr Old Samsung Omnia W is still working great and kicking it all, but I have always wanted a droid. Unfortunately I didn't have the budget to get a great droid and the value one's were too slow for my use. So the phone I got is Karbonn S1 Titanium. It cost me INR 7500/-; that's about $120 going by dollar's current value of about 62INR. This is a quad-core droid though it uses Qualcomm's first-gen quads (S4 play) which have average performance, 1GB RAM, 4GB inbuilt Memory, Dual SIM, Android 4.1. The overall performance is goof enough, the screen is good enough, touch response is a bit finicky, but the battery lasts whole day so overall it was a good purchase.

On professional growth part, I have managed to upgrade my coding skills quite a bit thanks to my current organization. We use Qt/ PostgreSQL and the solution runs on both Windows and Linux. For the year my work has been divided into about 50% R&D; 30% Product; 20% Projects. Being a senior member of the development team with much more exposure to Linux and Qt; I was handed over a lot of R&D activity where a lot of new functionality was to be developed. Some of them were:
Working with OpenSSL and Qt and create an Authentication mechanism for use with existing product.
Working with existing product to add mechanism to maintain data integrity and notify data quality
Working with external statistical libraries to create bulk data analysis tool.
Porting existing product to Qt5 from Qt4.5
Restructuring existing product to separate core functionality and modularize it so that extra functionality can be added in the form of plugins

So overall it was a busy year in the company and I will remember many nights coming home totally tired; having dinner and promptly falling asleep only to wake up by 6AM next day for another cycle.

As to 2014; I don't have any plans neither have I set any goals. I need change. I need to make my life easier. And I need to get back to open source and start working on some of the amazing stuff all these talented people are working on. And I am still wondering how I am going to do that. Maybe I'll figure it out in 2014 and my next 'Another year gone' post will mention it.



( :P Couldn't help!!!)

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