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 really interesting. I discovered I had to change some habits and improve 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 interacting with people, even though I still have some difficulty understanding everything in English since I am 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 :

• Django Girls podcast
• Pycoder’s weekly
• Trey hunner twitter account
• Adams Johnson books and blog
• ...

And conferences, even for past years 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 dev world but you can inspire even on things that don't seem huge.

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 to attend to the next one. And in real life, so many amazing people have told me that it's a different experience and I really want to see that and see the people I talk to, so many times in the 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, it's all about code, but there are so many things to do besides coding 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 I didn't know much before.

Individuals contributions

I guess this is my best year for contributing to open source, I contributed to many projects. From small contributions to big ones. I contributed to a big project: Django. It was amazing, I also learned while doing it. It's not an impressive contribution, but I hope it will be useful to everyone who uses this amazing framework! I hope to make more contributions, especially in the 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 from someone and the person can also learn from you