Annual Review – What I did on 2017?

2017 was a great year for me, as all the years. Sharing here on how it went. Yes. It is too late to write this now. It is because of the few lifestyle changes I am following. Its is OK to do many things slowly and drop few things. Am I right?

Health :

I was trying to reduce my ongrowing tummy for years. in 2017, took some serious, series of efforts.

• Joined Zumba Dance class on Sep 2017. It is a thrice in a week class. I attend 2 classes, atleast.
• Bought a cycle on October 2017 and went to office in cycle. It was around 40 km per round trip. Cycled for 2 months, twice in a week.
• Exercised for 10-15 min every day, mostly.

With all these efforts, my hip size came to 34 from 39. It is a great improvement. Thanks to “Dude Academy” and Master Kannadasan for inspiring.

Got fever 4 times. Those bad days reminded how bad my health is. It is time to eat good food, and siddha medicines which gave enormous immunity in my school/college days. started to have the medicines prepared by my dad.

Stopped drinking cool drinks, fried items like pizza, burger etc.

Family:

• Viyan got into a nearby school. He is in LKG now.
• He sent hand drawn Deepavali Wishes post cards to all our friends.
• Nithya learnt karagam, Poikal Kuthirai dances. She is performing in various event. She wrote a ebook on Javascript. Released a video on Bigdata and Elasticsearch
• Brother Arulalan joined at meteorology department as scientist in Noida.
• Brother Suresh got a government job.

Office:

Office works made me keep on learning new things. Elasticsearch, Spark, Druid, Python3, AWS api are some great things I explored. Completed reading one book fully on the technology I start to work.

Travel:

• Went to Vienna, Austria for a wikipedia hackathon. Met many interesting people and blogged the event happenings of Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.
• Went to Yelagiri for Nithya’s karagam dance on a government function.
• Went to Kothagiri for marriage of Nithya’s friend’s sister.
• Went to Kerala with Office friends and their Family.
• Went to Pondicherry and visited science center, bharathiyar house etc.
• Went to Melmalaiyanur with family.
• Went to Beaches few times in the early morning. Those are really great times.
• Went to DakshanChitra many times for Nithya’s dance practises.
• Went to Sriperumbuthur as Nithya danced for Sri Ramanujar’s 1000th birthday celebrations.
• Went to Kumbakonam and nearby places with office friends.
• Went to few resorts with office friends.

Foss Contributions:

• IITM and SSN College of Engineering, released a good Tamil Text-to-Speech system. Met IITM team and learnt how to install in linux. Automated and released it here.
• In Vienna wikipedia hackathon, enabled LinguaLibre to upload voice files to wikipedia commons.
• Helped to released a telegram bot to translate strings collaboratively for the english strings in openstreetmaps to tamil.
• Helped to released a “Send to kindle” option for the ebooks in FreeTamilEbooks.com
• Got some interest on adding interesting places to OSM. Used cycle to roam around tambaram and added many places with the maps.me app.
• Conducted 2 hackathons for ilugc. one for tamil computing and one for wikipedia.
• Conducted 1 event for ebook making training.

Society:

• Found a social team “Agaththi” in Tambaram. Participating on their market for organic formers.
• Filed few RTI in YouRTI.in for the issues in Tambaram and got few resolved.

Writing:

Wrote 57 blog post in this blog and 6 posts in Tamil in my tamil blog. This is low. Will try to increase next year. Writing a book on Python in Tamil. Hope will release by next year. But I have read plenty of books this year. I love reading than writing. Lazy me.

Books Read:

• Eat That Frog – Brain Tracy
• Python3 – Object Oriented Programming – Dusty Philips
• Open Access Ebooks – E.S. Hellman
• Deep Work – Cal Newport
• OpenStreetMap – Jonathan Bennett
• Minimalism – Joshua, Ryan
• The Power of Less – Leo Babauta
• Learning ELK Stack – Saurabh Chhajed
• Docker – A Quickstart Beginner’s guide – Andy Hayes
• Mastering Elasticsearch – Rafał Kuć, Marek Rogoziński
• 20 years of KDE – Lydia Printscher
• Facebook Logout – Experiences and Reasons to leave it – Ivo Quartiroli
• Elasticsearch The Defenitive Guide – clinton, Zachary
• Realtime Bigdata Analysis – Mike Barlow
• Balancing on the Edge – Matthew Hayes
• Open Advice – Lydia Pintscher
• Zen in the art of Street photography – Eric Kim
• Book : A Futurist’s Manifesto – Huge McGuire
• 25 Lessons I’ve Learned about Photography and Life – Lorenzo Dominguez
• AWS Lambda: A Guide to Serverless Microservices – Matthew Fuller
• DISCONNECT: FIND BALANCE IN YOUR DIGITAL LIFE – Thomas Moen, Lars Bratsberg
• Digital Detox: Unplug To Reclaim Your Life – Damon Zahariades
• நாகர்களின் ரகசியம் – அமீஷ்
• காந்தி சிலைக் கதைகள் – பா. ராகவன்
• நகையலங்காரம் – பா. ராகவன்
• சிவகாமி பர்வம் – ஆனந்த் நீலகண்டன்
• சில ரகசியக் குறிப்புகள் – ஜோதிஜி திருப்பூர்
• தகவல் அறியும் உரிமைச் சட்டம் – பராகத் அலி
• ஏரிகள் நகரம் – நைநிதால் – வெங்கட் நாகராஜ்
• சுஜாதாட்ஸ் – சுஜாதா
• கிருஷ்ணா கிருஷ்ணா – இந்திரா பார்த்தசாரதி
• வாழ்விலே ஒரு முறை – ஜெயமோகன்
• எக்ஸலன்ட் – பா.ராகவன்
• விலங்குப் பண்ணை – ஜார்ஜ் ஆர்வெல்
• வாரன் பஃபட் – செல்லமுத்து குப்புசாமி
• பாட்ஷாவும் நானும் – சுரேஷ் கிருஷ்ணா
• கோவை 2 அமெரிக்கா – பாசு
• இயற்கை சமூகம் வாழ்க்கை – தாம்பரம் மக்கள் குழு
• தொழிலியல் விஞ்ஞானி ஜி. டி. நாயுடு – என். வி. கலைமணி
• பழைய குப்பைகள் – ஜோதிஜி திருப்பூர்
• எளிய தமிழில் WordPress – தமிழ்
• எளிய தமிழில் Selenium – து.நித்யா
• தந்தை பெரியார் – அமரர் கே. பி. நீலமணி
• எளிய தமிழில் CSS – து.நித்யா
• புகைப்பட அனுபவங்கள் – கல்பட்டு நடராஜன்
• கொஞ்சம் காசு கொஞ்சம் கல்வி – ஜோதிஜி திருப்பூர்
• பொலிக பொலிக! – பா. ராகவன்

Thanks to PacktPub’s One free ebook per day, Kindle Unlimited Plan and All authors of FreeTamilEbooks.com for providing tons of great books to read.

With the Kindle device, I enjoyed plenty of hours in continuous reading.

Award :

Got an award for the contributions on Tamil computing on 2016 from The Tamil Literary Garden, Canada. Received Rs. 50,000 as prize money. Working on creating an organization with this money to do more contributions with more volunteers. Will ask for donations soon.

LifeStyle:

Was living a simple, minimalistic lifestyle.
Quited TV, Facebook and smartphone two years ago. Still able to live without them. Prioritized the life in the order of Health, Family, Office, Personal growth, FOSS Contributions.

Thus, the year 2017 was so great. It gave me great lessons via bad experiences too. Those are opportunities for me to learn about people and world.

Hope you too had a great year. Hoping that 2018 will be even more exciting for all of us.