What feels like the end is often the beginning
AS 2021 comes to an end, I thought of writing about how I spent 2021 as my monthly blog post. In this blog post, I will go through the major things that happen to me briefly. Without further due let’s get started.
Rootcode Labs
When 2021 was starting I was working as an intern at Rootcode Labs. Unfortunately, we had to work from home because of the pandemic. It was such a great experience. I’m thankful to Rootcode Labs for giving me this opportunity.
If you want to know more about my internship experience you can read the following blog post.
My internship experience as a Rootcoder
University Starts
After waiting for almost 2 years finally the university started in June. So I had to leave Rootcode Labs to start my undergraduate life. We were having online lectures I was fool enough to think that this will be easy just like our teachers told us when we were doing A/Ls. Little did I know. xD
ScholarX 2021
I was fortunate to be selected as a mentee in ScholarX 2021. My mentor was Prof. Arosha Bandara. It was an honour to be mentored by him. I was struggling with managing time with the start of university. My mentor introduced me to this “GTD” framework which completely change the way I manage my time. ScholarX program helped me in numerous ways. Here are some of the blog posts I wrote about my scholarX journey.
What I learned so far by being a ScholarX mentee
Do you want to know the art of stress-free productivity?
Sustainable Education Foundation- SEF
SEF is the place where everything started. I joined them almost 2 years ago. For the past few months, we were working on building a platform for ScholarX. We were able to successfully run a pilot program on the platform which was a great achievement. Currently, we are working on creating the v2.
In SEF we have biweekly knowledge sharing sessions. I was able to do 14 knowledge sharing sessions and I’m very happy that I was able to share my knowledge with others.
OpenMRS
Apart from SEF, I started contributing to OpenMRS as well. Early in the year, I was contributing to their DHIS 2 module and currently, I’m contributing to the QA framework where I wrote my first E2E tests using Cypress and Cucumber.
New Hobby
As soon as university started I started something I always wanted to do which was to play the guitar. So I bought an acoustic guitar and learned some chords through youtube. Then I bought an electric guitar cuz I wanted to play some rock/metal songs. It’s almost six months since I started and I’m really enjoy playing even though my playing is nowhere near good. It takes lots of practice to play the good stuff. Here are some of the small things I played.
My new part-time job
After leaving Rootcode Labs, I was able to join a young startup from Germany called promiseQ. promiseQ utilizes machine learning recognition and human verification to provide accurate and fast decisions on alarm detections. For the past six months, I was working there with VueJs and Firebase. So far so good. There are a lot of Sri Lankans there as well.
Goals for 2022
Doing Google Summer of Code
This will be my main goal for 2022. I applied for Google Summer of Code this year as well but unfortunately, I didn’t get selected.
Focus more on academics
I thought of focusing more on academics cuz I feel that I’m not doing great at this.
Play some cool solos
I’m going to stick with practising more guitar to become an intermediate player and by the next year, I want to play my favourite solos. I might buy another guitar as well xD.
With that, we came to the end of the article. I’m pretty happy with what I achieved this year and hoping to achieve my goals in 2022 as well.
I’m wishing you a Happy new year and hope you will be able to achieve your goals. Don’t forget to check out my other articles as well. See you guys at the next one. Until then stay safe! ✌️
