Hi All, I know we are half way through first month of January of the new decade and I have not started writing any blog. Things has been pretty messy this year personally and professionally it has been an awesome year. I would say impeccable. Lets start 2020 with an Review to start accepting your faults and start the decade 2020  with no regrets and only positiveness and goals.

Let’s start with flashback of 2019 what I did through out 2019 with Blogging,  Top blogs, Books I read, reason behind writing a book, C# MVP, first onsite trip, struggling with depression, anxiety and sleep.

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Setting Up My workstation-

Setting up my workstation was a dream for me since I started coding. Thankfully I have my own workstation which suffice my need and make me productive while coding or blogging. I will be posting my new workstation soon. But I must say you should have your own workstation it make things more valuable and productive.

 

Blogging

If I compare my blogging stats since the day I started writing, I have learned a lot and stats speak of themselves.

It has been huge achievement from me, as you can see the Year 2019 was in peak though I was not consistent after July 2019 and I really feel bad about it, because I actually planned I will write as many blogs I can.  As you know

“After the rain, the sun will reappear. There is life. After the pain, the joy will still be here”

I have finally took the courage to write again despite procrastinating for so long because I have lot of things to be shared.

Despite blogging I was also helping a lot of people in our community groups, telegrams channel. It was worth time spending because you know things but if you are able explain those things to someone else than it really means you know it better and you are helping the community.

I started Public Speaking which was my dream because I used to suck as an speaker and hardly could say anything.  I remember my self speaking in-front of my friends and school and chocking it and feeling embarrassed. It has been learning curve watching YouTube videos and really working hard on your pitch, delivering. presentation, creating a story that everyone loved and being funny.

These below mails kept me going ahead where I wanted to share my knowledge and keep on improving on my speaking skills. I went through lots of YouTube videos to keep on learning creating a story for the presentation. All my sessions had an story because they are worth to keep the people engaged rather than having just slides and moving them around. I learned how to create animation in power point to demonstrate with animation because human mind remember picture not words. (Concept Visualization)

Thankful to people who actually mailed me these It really makes me feel alive every time I read them.

 

 

 

I almost watched all videos of ReverentGeek in YouTube scratched his  website reading all his blog post and I was stunned because they are so awesome. I watched Scott Hanselman,  Dan Roam videos to understand there way of delivering the content and they are  always treat to watch. I wanted to extract some information from all of these videos so I used to take notes and self perform in front of Mirror. I have put lot of my weekends doing this just to deliver the good content to the participants.

Book Publications

Mean while I was also working on my  book project to share my learning on Azure. Many people don’t know the reason behind me writing a book. I used to work on a project where we were leveraging Azure Cloud offering for one of customer. But as a team we didn’t had any knowledge sharing session on cloud and all. I was aware of Azure and all but practical implementation was missing. While working on the cloud based task, I used to struggle a lot and no one used to help me. I remember after implementing the wrong solution the team member one who use to have access told me you should have done like this. I remember I re-wrote the entire Design in the single night just to deliver the story in a really best practice way.

After that I promised myself that I would not let this happen again and I started reading about cloud. I saw all videos on Azure Friday, read many awesome books, used my Visual Studio subscription (which many developers are not aware of, please use it, It’s free) to do practical implementation.

I remember I used to go to office from 11 am to 11 pm and then I used to study till 3 am. I continued this for almost 4 months. Slowly Slowly my Azure knowledge was improving. I was doing lots of in-depth POC(Proof of concept) breaking the Web Apps, Testing Web Jobs and Azure function to the limits and was actively helping other people on Facebook, twitter and telegram.

I am fortunate enough to have really good mentors in my life. One of them is ShivPrasad Koirala who has helped me throughout my life. Whatever I am today it;s just because of him. We always have discussion on tech and what we should be doing. He is fun guy to be around always positive and wants you to grow. He asked my why don’t you write your own book. I was working on writing Angular book with some other author but was not really enjoying because for me Azure was fun. So I started writing everything from a fresher point of view starting from beginning where to start and kept on going.

I learn that to write a book you don’t have to be perfect writer you just have to write and things will fall into place slowly slowly. I worked on this project for almost 6 months. I was so passionate that I read a lots of other books, Azure Docs and was constantly blogging. I was happy that BPB Publication was happy to publish my book thought some author didn’t gave a good review. I was nervous but was okay with everything going around because I had already in my mind if not published will do self publish it.

Money was never a motive behind writing it. It was an amazing experience because I learned a lot about publication and all. I want to thank my friend, big brother Arnel Mutec  and my roommates Anshu , Nikhil and Yogesh as well for constantly motivating me, helping me improvise my blog content and  proof reading my book  at night time 2 am. Just to make sure content is correct. Thanks for all sleepless nights and all correction we made at last moment, It was worth doing.

Late night proof reading the book again to make sure there are no grammatical errors. 🤣

Happiness of seeing your manuscript converted into a hard copy book is  very difficult to articulate my true feelings. You can’t express the feeling you just feel gratitude towards god.

 

After all the hard work and patience the day came for the book launch of the book. I remember I was in Bangalore for the project and was pretty nervous because event was in Mumbai and you know Mumbai in rainy season. You can just think of massive water logging and nothing. We had fixed the event date and I have to present and share my knowledge to the people and share the journey.

I prepared the deck and practical demos and practiced them again and again to make sure I don’t fail on stage. I want to thanks my friend Digambar who was kind enough to create a banner for my event despite being busy in his tight schedule.

 

 

I remember praying to god please god stop the rain, how I am gonna do it. What if no one appears, What if I suck at the stage with all the trauma going. I took the Mumbai flight with heavy heart reached my flat took Mealatonin to sleep and control anxiety and reached the venue  in the morning.

I was bit nervous but thanks to all the participants and friends It never look difficult. I really enjoyed my talk and this was my first talk in-front of crowd of people.
I am happy it didn’t rained and event was worth. By the way it rained heavily after the event.

 

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Sending book to my mentors as a token of thanks  👀

When all these things were going on in my life I was also personally struggling with my relationships. I hardly talked with my parents, friends. I hardly slept because my mind was full with these things going on 👀 I used to take Melatonin to recycle my sleeping time. I was just trying to keep on moving forward despite my personal life was on stake. It was difficult for me everyday to start writing again because things were totally messed up. I have almost drafted 12  blog  posts which didn’t reached publish button. I kept my mind positive and kept on learning new things and avoid distracting my mind.

During this time I took lots of wrong decision which I am not really proud of and kept my self doubting and making things worst.

C# Corner MVP
Finally after blogging for almost 4 years in C# Corner as well I was awarded as Most Valuable Person for my contribution to the community. I was really happy about this achievement as well.

 

 

First Onsite Trip

While I was struggling with my personal life I finally got the onsite opportunity which all IT Engineer dream of in there life. I went to UK for a business trip and that was really a turning point again because a totally new challenge was coming and I wanted to have new challenges now.
I was never surrounded by so many foreigners around me ever in my life 🤣. I promised my self before going for the project I will just give my best and leave everything on gods hand.

I started learning about UK culture, travelling via tube (thanks to oyster card) I really loved people energy out there and there work life balance. People enjoy there work , work hard for 8-9 hours and leave the work in office and enjoy the other part of life.  I personally was thinking and questioning myself what I have been doing and where I am right now. Above achievements didn’t felt me proud at time and I was self doubting my decisions. I made some good friends out there learned a lot from other people out there work-life balance, everyone used to leave there laptops in office after office timings.

They enjoyed like there is no tomorrow and I have my Jest(testing framework) failing test in my mind 🤦‍♂️ I guess it’s because of the life I have been living for months or years. One thing I really enjoyed was team culture where everyone was helping each other for the one goal to provide value to the customer.

The challenge has its ups and downs, but you can never lose focus of your individual goals and you can’t let yourself be beat because of lack of effort.

Travelling

Some of my travel pics

                              Deptford Bridge- London

                                                                    London Bridge

                                                                              London Eye

                                                                           Awesome lovely Team

Failures

I also failed miserably in many things:

1.  Not blogging consistently
2.  Not able to create Video tutorials I took a mic to start creating video tutorials.
3.  Sleepless nights

Thanks for reading so far. I took a lot of courage to write this all and planning to start blogging again in 2020 with lots of really awesome in-depth article.
I am slowly slowly getting over things and feeling much better. This year I will focusing strongly on Azure, Java Script, React and ASP.NET Core.

You will see lots of good article on SCRUM, some video tutorials and some talks as well. Wishing you all the very best for 2020 and wish me luck.