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The Past 6 months of my Life in 6 mins πŸ•™

Posted 23. March 2019 8 min read.

Hello dev.to :wave:

I said that for the first time in October when I decided to share the things I learn, achieve and fail at along my 'tech journey'. Even though December was the last time I actually put out an update, the past few months have been a lot despite the radio silence. I'm going to share how and why :sparkles:. In October, my Vue and GraphQL journey was going great, I went through Queries and Mutations and did these two blog posts.

October was also a really hard time for me. I joined a very exclusive group of individuals who got thier applications for a US visa denied, because of that I couldn’t attend GitHub Universe (even with the scholarship I got) and had to give my talk at the inaugural GitHub Campus Expert Summit remotely.

_Sorry I reference a lot of my tweets_

November saw me tour Jaipur, amazing is an understatement!

While in Jaipur, I helped out with a workshop at LNMIT, a renowned college in Jaipur. After soaking up enough of the Pink City, it was time to visit my home town - Lusaka, Zambia :heart:. In Lusaka, I organised a meetup to get more high school students started with programming. Taking up programming is something most people there only do in college, usually not by choice. The point of this was to find out ways to make things better, if possible. For a developing country like Zambia to really catch up with the rest of the world, this needs to happen, I really think this is necessary. Believe me when I say there's so much going on in Zambia.

Zambia also had it's first developer conference and I was lucky enough to give a talk titled "Leveraging Developer Communities to Advance your Career", anything to help the ecosystem grow. This was important for me, sharing is caring and damn do I care.

πŸ”Œ Shameless plug

We have this years developer conference coming up in September, feel free to reach out to me if you want to play a part or if you just want to know more about our lovely community.

A couple of notable things happened while in Zambia. I was on my first podcast. {% spotify spotify:episode:3vDwiyy7mzkYNJd0MvQ5TG %}

I met the former president of Zambia and talked tech.

It was a good trip, eventually I had to get back to India to write my exams, which I passed - Thank God.

December is my birth month... I don't know how relevant that is but yeah lol. I attended my first DevRel conference - Hackerference India. In usual Daniel fashion, I threaded about it.

I also gave a talk at the GirlScript India Summit. This was also important for me because being a minority in tech - inclusion is something I feel strongly about. GirlScript India is doing the lords work in this regard, simply amazing! Check out [Girlscript](https://girlscript.tech) and all the great work they do.

Happy New Year πŸŽ‰

January came with a lot of looking back, planning and thinking. I went to Delhi to give a workshop on Version Control with Git at Amity University. Delhi was done and almost a week later, I was in Indore where I gave two sessions, the first with GDG Indore on building Voice Apps. They have such a great community, it's in my list of places to visit again.

The second session was at DAVV Indore, I did an introductory workshop to coding with JavaScript. Believe it or not, I actually live coded for the first time, I was too scared to do it before so yes, this was fun and I loved it because as I taught, I learned and become better at what I do. That's really important to me - growth.

That was January...

Well actually no, more sad news - I couldn't give my talk at Git Merge in Belgium because yet again, yes visa issues. Alas you've got to move on right?

February - I don't talk about this much here but I lead/led my university student developer community called Uniphyd. We had our first hackathon, HexaHive which also happened to be the first hackathon I organised independently, so many memories. As usual, here's a Twitter thread.

Oh and I lost my phone literally 10 hours before the event, I've got such great great luck πŸ™ƒ. As you can tell, it had been a crazy few months for me . I decided to visit Pune for a short break and attend a music festival. That in itself is a whole other blog post, "Attending a music festival in a city you've previously never been to without a phone for beginners", lol good content πŸ‘Œ. I got to see TroyBoi and Bonobo live so πŸ€·πŸΎβ€β™‚οΈ

That was February βœ”οΈ

March isn't even over yet and damn it's been such a packed month already. I had my final project presentation, my team and I are working on multi-class x-ray image classifier, I can't share too much about it at the moment because it will ruin the presentation we have to give early April. Event wise, I had Footprints (a student tech festival) at MSU, Baroda where I helped organise a Machine Learning with Python Bootcamp with some friends. A few days later, I had two very impromptu requests for GitHub and Git workshops, I like to help so why not - I gave two of those workshops in a day - fun (he says sarcastically) {% twitter 1101072208565362689 %}

The next week I had Makerfest where I got my first booth taste of booth duty manning the GitHub booth. I met such amazing makers and innovators and also evangelised open source with some amazing people!

That's what I've been upto dev.to sorry for being so uhm quiet :p

Oh and did I mention GraphQL Asia? I'm playing a little part (emphasis on little) in helping make Asia's first GraphQL conference happen! It's April 12th and 13th if you can make it, please get your tickets before they sell out. I'll be there, maybe we can meet in person :p

After that? Who knows,I graduate soon and I'm looking to relocate and start developer advocacy full time. If you're hiring, let me know πŸ˜‰

Lessons?

I've learned to say no to a lot of things now and I'm only concentrating on things I actually want to do. Planning and introspection are really important. Hopefully now I can be a little more consistent with my updates.

Hey, what about the Vue GraphQL journey? I found myself asking the same question. Somehow it all got lost in middle of everything going on. But like I said, now I'm a little more aware of what I need to do and why. I'm looking forward to all that I have to learn, got a bunch of technical stuff in draft.

I did this post because I made a promise. I've been thinking a lot about how online influence and actual influence vary usually. Just because I don't share it all, doesn't mean I don't so it. At the time of writing this I'm a full time student, part time developer advocate (intern), community lead, conference organiser (sort of) plus I have a whole other life. I kept beating myself up about not being consistent, I realised that I shouldn't be so hard on myself for not sharing everything I do because I simply did not have time and no one should feel bad about because they don't either. Even though it makes it seem like you don't have an effect because you're not getting attention lol (I sound so basic, Lord help me) but hey do you, keep making that impact even if no one sees it. I don't know, still thinking about this, what do y'all think about this?

Also I'm re-doing my personal website and I'm so excited to be reaching into a side of myself I haven't before and it's exciting.

Till next time β™₯️

#journey #Life
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living my truth, unapologetically...