It was Jan 2022, and I was writing my learning from DPS, Munich, last year. Still, the irony was that even though I worked as a software engineer, the invaluable lesson I learned at DPS was not related to engineering; instead, it was dealing with human connections and leading the team in times of conflict and unresponsiveness.

While I was working on my university projects, as the deadline was approaching, I got the test link for the Bitcoin Summer of Code and was required to brush up on my algorithmic skills along with completing the trading bot and data visualizer project and report for the rest of the two modules along with managing Micromasters in economics as well.

Done with my university midterms, I appeared for the Bitocin Summer of Code test and could not perform as expected to qualify for the next round.

Discontent with myself, I started looking to learn or build something that could uplift me from my current stage, and very soon, someone reached out for a freelance project which I completed much earlier before the deadline, but at the time of deployment, I was facing a blackout.

My client was unavailable after the deployment period as she will be out of the office; even though the code was on GitHub shared by us, we could not deploy on time, and I lost the deal.

It was March, and I was building the DJ application and a WebCam Piano application for my university assignment.

At the same time, I was stressed regarding the Discrete Mathematics modules as I could not appear for the final exam last year due to an error in the university system. It happened again, and I could not access the DM final exam due to an error. Somehow I coped with that incident, and the university assured me that I could appear for the DM exam next year without hassle.
I moved on and started managing logistics, site planning, and much more for my parent's 25th anniversary in May, with an expected guest list of around 3k; I was overwhelmed but conducted the event successfully as expected.

At the same time, I mentored at an open-source program SheCodeAfrica and helped the mentees during the program to complete their projects, and after that, I mentored at CodePath.org.

I got reached out by someone from project Rowy, and I joined their discord server and soon was participating in a discussion and made a couple of PRs, even though I became less active later for project Rowy, I was fascinated by the concept of building a low code application on top of Firebase that allows building other applications on top of Rowy.

Rowy is an incredible combination of using the expertise of Google's infrastructure for loading balancing and all of the boilerplate stuff and building a low-code application that allows building pipelines, CMS, internal tooling, business logic, and a lot more.

I soon got the acceptance email from the MLH Fellowship for their upcoming summer batch and decided to move to Banglore to join meetups, learn from senior engineers, and much more, but as I reached the city, I got scammed by a hotel that used to post lower prices online and then forced to pay higher or leave; it was 9 PM, and I adjusted as I didn't have any place to say.

The next day I found a PG and shifted there, eagerly waiting to join my onboarding meeting for the MLH Fellowship, but my laptop crashed; using my diagnostic skills, I discovered that the motherboard was gone.

I ordered a new laptop, but it wasn't performing as expected; hence I contacted Amazon support; they sent an engineer to fix it up, but it didn't happen, and after a week, I returned it and ordered a different one.

Two and half weeks of my MLH fellowship were gone in vain, and I was running behind schedule, but I found the community, team, pod leader, and mentor were so supportive that they helped me get back on track, and soon I was scheduling so many 1on1 with the community members that I did over 40+ one on one by the end of my fellowship.

After MLH, I got into the Des Femmes Bitcoin Mentorship program, became an XRPL Campus Ambassador, enrolled in Data Science Micromasters, and soon got the Hacker House Scholarship to attend Solana Hacker House in Delhi.

I met a lot of MLH Fellows, hackers, and investors that helped me build connections, catalyzed my learning, and broke multiple mental barriers of mine as earlier, I used to learn and develop in isolation.

But this was the first time I loved the event's vibe and building with other hackers instead of the unfulfillment I got earlier by winning in other hackathons and events. After Hacker House, I realized the invaluable aspect of human meetings.

Soon, I was at T-Hub Hyderabad and the Hacktober fest meetup at Microsoft Arc Reactor, where I met many people for the first time with whom I was interacting online earlier only.

As an XRPL campus ambassador, I hosted my first workshop, but nobody showed up; some even pointed out that it was a promotion of particular crypto and blockchain; as I dug deeper, I found it was due to the frustration of the bear market and a mix of reasons, some never heard of XRPL program, some didn't trust it, hence organized the workshop second time with more descriptive info, and it worked that time, and people registered and showed up.

During my team at the Des Femmes Bitcoin Mentorship program, I met a lot of senior engineers, bitcoin core contributors, and community managers who were devoting their time and effort to uplift the community for free, which led to an increase in my participation in mentoring at the hackathons, coding boot camps and eventually, I became a mentor at the MLH public server.

Around the end of October, I became interested in the Hyperledger project and started participating in their meetings, pair programming sessions, and discussions.

I applied for the same project at the LFX Mentorship program and got the acceptance email, but before that, I was rejected three times.

I spent a week building the project manually, and I couldn't do it; sometimes, there were unavailable packages for windows, and sometimes, there were convention errors that only worked with Linux.

Frustrated with all this, I used the dockerized dev environment, and it only took me one click and 20 minutes to get the dev environment up and running, which amazed me.

After the development environment was up and running, I started reading docs and third-party package integration manuals and started experimenting with it.

It was all going well until I got a severe attack from my chronic illness, I returned to my home and later got dengue positive as well, which caused the absence for more than two weeks, and at that time, I was frustrated, disappointed, discouraged and annoyed with myself.

I was thinking about withdrawing from the program, but I joined the pair programming session with Peter; he was welcoming, understood my circumstances, and even helped me longer than the meeting time.

In December, I got an acceptance letter from the Global Governance Initiative for their Young Leader program; in the upcoming days, I will be learning about policy and management consulting from experts and top leaders from Mckenzie, BCG, and more.

While in Banglore, I witnessed some horrifying incidents, such as malnourished animals and kids.

At the same time, I was part of a circle that was spending excessively in a compulsive cycle.

This caused a crisis inside me and eventually led to my decision to volunteer my time for a local cause and donate ten percent of my earnings to reasons related to these.

I realized that problems like these would cease to exist if more people started volunteering for the local initiative along with donation money, it's weird how these problems can exist in India, where the history is so rich and diverse.

Even though I could not reach my benchmark for the year 2022, I am hoping to exceed it for 2023, and I learned much more about human connections, behavior, and social sciences than hard sciences.

From dissatisfaction, assumption, confusion, and isolation to conviction, facts, clarity, and mentor circle, I learned a lot in 2022 and hope to grow and learn much more in 2023.