After resolving to do yearly reviews the past two years, I’m doing one for 2019. Yay!

I wanted to create more in 2019. I enabled creations. Not bad.

I wanted to read more books. I read more than any other year in 2019.

I wanted to go digital in books. I did fine.

Blogs to GitHub

I moved (replicated, rather) my blog posts since 2016 to GitHub. All content is under writing repository.

Enabling creations

Along with a group of well-meaning folk we initiated monthly hackathons. These hackathons transformed into workshops and then into data storytelling events. We had fun organizing them in February, May, June, July, August, September, October and December. With an initial goal to have high internal participation at Gramener we expanded to include external participation to organizing a weekend event.

At most of these events we had a theme: physical data viz, GIFs, videos. Some didn’t have a specific theme.

In December we partnered with ISB to host a weekend storytelling event in December. It was possibly our best organized event so far.

We made the learnings from all events public. Organizing periodic events is exhausting and takes a toll on all the team. We now have streamlined our learnings from the events and created a calendar of events for 2020 at the end of 2019.

Reading

I took a goodreads challenge for 25 books and completed it (read 27). I wanted 2019 to be the year of scifi reading but ended up with many non-scifi graphic novels. Specifically, I loved The Three-Body Problem, The Shooting Star, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, The Hunting Accident, daytripper, Anywhere But Home, March.

I read more than in 2018 (16/24) but don’t remember much of what I read towards the end of the year, sadly. I’ll probably cut down the books I read in 2020.

Digital books

I went digital for all year except for one penultimate day of the year where I bought a physical book at a book fair. I relied on Kindle and Audible purchases. As convenient as they’re the pain of lack of book sharing is too real. I’ll fallback to a mix of physical and digital books this year.

Conferences

Although going to conferences wasn’t planned I ended up speaking at PyConf Hyderabad and Agami.

At Agami Summit, we hosted a physical data visualization on women judges representation in district courts. I loved interacting with legal domain folk, participants loved our take on AR-integrated data comic book and a quiz-format for discovering information. I briefly wrote about it.

At PyConf I conducted a workshop on Gramex. As they say, the best way to learn is to teach. I had one rehearsal with the CFP team, improved on their feedback. Here’s the material. The feedback from workshop participants was positive. I enjoyed the community experience at PyConf, engaged in lots of good conversations.

2020

I’m taking up public learning in 2020 and hope to achieve bunch of stuff this year:

  • contribute to open source software.
  • I took a much needed break and started curating food recipes.
  • Be an active citizen.
  • Create more.