2021, year in review

Hi there, it’s have been a while… First of all, I want to say happy new year to you, best wishes !!

Thank you to Katherine Michel and Dawn Wages for inspiring me to do a Year in Review blog post!

TL;DR

This year wasn’t my best year but I success to do things I can’t imagine do.

My highlights for the year have been:

• Attending to DjangoCon Europe and US
• Do a lightning talk
• Pass Hacktoberfest challenge
• Make a contribution to a huge project
• Discover and be part of an amazing community

Learning and improvements

I learn a lot this year, by trying things, reading, and do mistakes of course. I read the book of Adams Johnson about testing, which is very interesting. I discovered I have to change so habits and do some improvement in some projects.

I’m trying to be more involved in things which I care about or I have an interest in, for example, testing or Open Source Software.

I also learn by exchange with people, even I still have some difficulties to understand everything in English since I’m not fluent but close too!

I discovered many things in 2021, there are so many resources : newsletter, podcast, twitter accounts (yeah really) let me list some of them :

And conferences, even for past year are really interesting. I definitely recommend you to check out!

I also discovered I can inspire others, even I don’t think I did something amazing as other great people of the community but you can inspire even on things that seems not a huge thing.

Conferences

I have attend to my first conference, DjangoCon Europe, and gave my first lighting talk ! I have wrote a post here, I hope I will have a chance you attend to the next one. And in real life, so many people amazing told me it’s another experience and I really want to see that and see people I speak with, so many times in virtual haha.

I also attend to DjangoCon US, it was very nice but I didn’t attend so long due to hours. I wanted to help the organizers but I didn’t have time to do so. If you want to contribute to the community. this is a way to do it. Many people think, first of is about code, but there are so many things to do except code for contribution.

I hope I will be able to do more meetups and exchange with people (in real life would be even better!).

Hacktoberfest as maintainer

I have done hacktoberfest for the second time, but this time I was contributor and also maintainer, thanks to Fum. This is a great experience, even I didn’t imagine how it can be exhausting. As a contributor you want things to happen quickly, but as a maintainer, it’s nice to see the engagement of people but so many things to do and some time people answer like the project is your only life, and I can tell you: this is totally NOT the case !

Despite that, I have learned so many things by reviewing: see things in another way, or dig in some subject you didn’t know much before.

Individuals contributions

I guess this is my best year for open source contribution, I contribute to many projects. Small to important contribution. I contribute to a big project : Django. It was amazing, I also learned by doing it. It’ not a impressive contribution but I hope it will be helpful for anyone who are using this amazing framework! I hope to make more contributions, especially in python ecosystem this new year.

Reminder to myself

2021 I tried things I didn’t think I would have done. If I have piece of advice to tell, it will be :

• Be more organized
• Try your best, if it’s not perfect, that’s fine
• Contribute, help, write. Sometimes you think it’s stupid or useless, but it’s not for someone else
• Exchange is gold. You can learn things for someone and the person can also learn from you