Year in Review - 2024

The days are long but the years are short. 2024 has been the best year in my life so far.

2024 taught me that you can just do things. I met a lot of people and made A LOT of new friends this year. I had a lot of new firsts. 2024 also taught me a lot of important lessons - the kind of lessons you can only learn from first hand experience. A lot of the work I've been doing in the past few years started paying off this year and I got to raise the bar for myself when it comes to a lot of things. 2024 was very much an unbelievable year. The days were indeed long but looking back the year went by in a flash. There was always something to look forward to and I'm grateful for being able to live an exciting year to its fullest.

This year I...

• Traveled outside India for the first time (and a second time, and a third time after that).
• Gave 6 talks in over 3 countries. This is the most talks I've given in a year so far.
• Attended 3 out of 4 and spoke at 2 out of 4 KubeCons. Attended and spoke at 2 out of 3 Kubernetes Maintainer Summits.
• Finally locked in on contributing to Kubernetes. I got my first PR merged to the kubernetes codebase in January 2024. Towards the end of the year I was able to get my first KEP in as well. Started consistently working on the CEL KEP with Priyanka in the second half of the year.
• I grew as a person and broadened my horizons with respect to my career and work. I attended conferences in 4 different countries and met hundreds of fellow developers.
• Participated in all the three Kubernetes release cycles throughout the year. Shadowed in v1.30 and v1.32 and led the enhancements team for v1.31.
• Quit my job, took a break and joined DigitalOcean to do more hardcore Kubernetes work.

The first three months of the year flew past with the Dan Kohn scholarship applications for KubeCon EU in Paris and all the travel planning once I got the scholarship. A lot of folks helped me with the my scholarship application and has supported me throughout my journey - Special thanks to Priyanka Saggu, my mentor, who was also the Kubernetes Release Team Lead for the v1.29 release cycle, which was the first cycle where I was selected as a shadow.

Getting to attend KubeCon EU was one of the best things that happened to me this year. All the work I've been doing in the Kubernetes open source community from somewhere around October 2022 finally led to me actually attending a KubeCon in person! The scale of it kept hitting me even after I was finally able to register in my brain what was happening. This was one of the first time this year I was taught that you can just do things. Getting to travel to Paris was a core memory and changed me and my core belief systems in several ways.

"No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you" - Carl Jung

The month after KubeCon was a really productive one. I was so fired up to learn and level myself up after experiencing KubeCon and meeting a lot of awesome folks from the community. I never wrote any of those experiences down though. Since one of my goals for this year is to write more, I'm thinking of revisiting those days, however details I must've lost to time.

I had got a talk selected for FOSSASIA Summit which happened in Vietnam in April, but since I had just returned from Paris two weeks before, I had to withdraw my talk. Another time! I learnt that focussing is saying no and that you can only do great work if you say no to things you want to do so that you can lock in on the things you really wanna do.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” - Steve Jobs

In May I traveled to Japan. I went to Okinawa first where I attended RubyKaigi and met Yukihiro Matsumoto. After 4 wonderful days at Okinawa, I spent the next week in Kyoto and Tokyo. Traveling to Japan was a dream of mine since I grew up watching anime and playing Nintendo games, but I was never expecting it to happen this year. You can just do things. It was wonderful. I will definitely visit Japan again.

In August, I visited Hong Kong and gave a talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China. I learnt my lesson from Japan and took a proper vacation from work before traveling to Hong Kong. I was traveling alone to a new country again after Paris and it was amazing. Before I returned I was able to spend a day in Macau as well. I made a lot of new friends at KubeCon - Emily, Yash, Ganesh, Nikhita. I also got to meet Linus Torvalds in person! Emily and I locked in and submitted a workshop for KubeCon India on the last day of KubeCon China (which ended up getting selected!).

In June I had made quite an impulsive decision to travel to Bangalore for attending the KuberTENes Birthday Bash event. The event was on a Friday and I decided on Wednesday evening that I shouldn't be missing it based on a gut feeling. I booked the flight tickets to travel to Bangalore early Friday morning and return back home Friday evening. This ended up being one of the most important decisions I took this year. I was at a point in my career where I wanted a reassuring push to be able to take decisions that I've been dreading for some time and I got it that day (Thanks Madhav!). I got the confidence to decide for myself that I want to quit my job and move on to a new opportunity. I met Aparna from Shopify and Aparna from DigitalOcean that day and I applied for both these jobs. Shopify was the first place I interviewed at, but the role ended up being too senior for my experience. It was still fun interviewing though! I spent the next 6 months applying for jobs and giving interviews. I also ended up quitting my job in October. By that time I had got that confidence to just quit. After 38 applications and 15 interviews across companies in the cloud native space, I finally got an offer from DigitalOcean. I had initially declined the offer for certain reasons, but ended up accepting it. I joined DigitalOcean from the third week of December once I was back from KubeCon India. I will write more about my job hunting experiences and all the lessons I learnt in the second half of the year in another post.

In December I got to travel again, this time to Delhi for the first KubeCon India. I had two talks, one at the maintainer summit and a workshop for KubeCon on running machine learning on Kubernetes with Emily. I was planning to stay a few more days and explore Delhi, but I decided to come back early since I had to start with DigitalOcean the next week. Another time Delhi!

Looking forward...

I hope and pray that 2025 flies by as fast as 2024 if not faster. These are some of the things that I'd like to do in this coming year

• Contribute more code to Kubernetes. I'm looking at you CEL.
• Learn how to say no better.
• Prioritize health and fitness and workout regularly.
• Read more books.
• Write more, maybe keep a journal.
• Get back into music. I had bought myself a MIDI controller at the end of last year. I'm really interested in music production and want to set myself a goal of producing at least 5 lofi tracks by the end of this year.
• Make meaningful relationships and nurture existing ones.
• Get myself a circle of folks who I look up to and can learn from.

Above everything, one of the most important things that I learnt this year was about setting boundaries, saying no to things and people and how you don't need to take shit from anyone. Growing up you tend to be told to obey laws and live as everyone else tells you to. It takes a lot of time to unlearn this pattern once we're out of school or college and start working full time. One of the biggest lessons I learnt this year was that I can be myself and still do everything I want and achieve my goals without having to compromise and fit into other people's moulds and expectations.

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist" - Friedrich Nietzsche

These are some lessons which I had to learn the hard way and I'm really truly grateful that I got to learn them this year. I'm really grateful to everyone who was there for me in 2024 and I look forward to an exciting and productive 2025!